
Book-J]J2L 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



INTEREST AND EDUCATION 



Interest is the greatest loord in Education. 

JACOB GOULD SCIIURMAN. 



^bap's. 






INTEREST AND EDUCATION 



THE DOCTKINE OF INTEREST AND 
ITS CONCRETE APPLICATION 



BY 



CHARLES DeGARMO 

PROFESSOR OF THE SCIENCE AND ART OF EDUCATION 
CORNELL UNIVERSITY 



I'll, ^> j,i> 



'>' 5 5 ,50 ',' ',' 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

LONDON: MACMILLAN & CO., Ltd. 
1902 

All rights reserved 



.DO 



THF L!3h*ARY OF 
CONGHEGij, 



CLA 



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y^xc No, 



Copyright, 1902, 

bt the macmillan company. 



Set up and electrotyped November, 1902. 



Norfajooli ^ress 

J. S. Cushing & Co. - Berwick & Smith 
Norwood Mass. U.S.A. 



TO 

D0CT0:R JOHN DEWEY 

STIjis Uolutne is Ecspcctfullg InscritjcU 



PREFACE 

The purpose of this volume is to make a 
concrete application of the doctrine of interest 
to the matter and methods of education. 

So long as mere training of the intelligence 
through drill upon the school arts, such as 
reading, spelling, grammar, and arithmetic, is 
regarded as the chief function of the elemen- 
tary school, there is small need for any specific 
doctrine of interest. One naturally refrains 
from being tedious in instruction when one 
might just as well be interesting, precisely for 
the same reason that one does not willingly 
appear unkempt or ill dressed in society. But 
to sharpen the intellect, all we have to do is to 
keep it alert by drilling it and by occupying it 
with the solution of problems of steadily in- 
creasing difficulty. Such work does not neces- 
sitate any glowing enthusiasm; it needs only 
steady application. It is not strange, therefore, 



Viii PREFACE 

that to those who conceive the sole end and 
aim of instruction to be the development of 
the intellect, the term ' interest ' is not a word 
to conjure with. 

Is it certain, however, that instruction should 
confine itself to one aspect of the mind ? Be- 
sides intelligence the child has feelings and 
volition. His feelings involve the group of 
mental states that we call instinct, impulse, 
emotion, desire, interest, pleasure, pain, etc. 
Moreover, his volitions are intimately connected 
with his feelings. May it not be that to estab- 
lish desirable permanent mental attitudes 
toward men and their institutions and toward 
Nature and her living creatures is one of the 
choicest opportunities, not to say most impera- 
tive duties, of the school ? Yet one's view of 
the world, one's hospitalit}^ or hostility respect- 
ing the order of things, is far more a matter 
of feeling than of intelligence. Why does a 
church desire to have the spiritual nurture of 
children committed to its care ? Surely not 
to drill their intellects, but rather to influence 
their feelings, to fix in desirable and permanent 
form their attitude toward God and man and 



PREFACE IX 

the church. Why do schools in the slums of 
New York have the children salute the flag 
and sing patriotic songs ? It is to secure that 
love of country which marks the good citizen. 
Is it not as important in every other field of 
training that the feelings of children should be 
tenderly nourished and properly directed, that 
abiding enthusiasms should be awakened in 
them, that their attitude toward men and things 
should not only be lighted by intelligence, but 
warmed by the glow of feeling ? 

When feeling as well as intellect is to be 
included in education, it is necessary that in- 
struction should involve more than mental drill ; 
it must include also such bodies of ideas as the 
feelings can cling to; it must impart knowl- 
edge capable of arousing enthusiasm; it must 
reveal nature and social institutions in such 
manner that desirable and permanent disposition 
toward them may be developed. If we wait for 
life itself to form the disposition, too much is 
left to accident. Misfortune or mistake may 
easily embitter and harden the heart ; whereas, 
had proper mental attitudes been formed dur- 
ing the school period, the individual would have 



X PKEFACE 

had a saner outlook. We must not make sweet- 
ness and light in life depend upon shrewdness 
or good fortune; it should emanate from the 
inmost depths of the soul. 

Again, mental attitude toward the world has 
its outcome in volition, since conduct is the 
legitimate conclusion of desire and interest. 
This brings instruction into line with the de- 
velopment of the whole mind, and greatly 
extends the influence of the school in the for- 
mation of character. The old-time reliance 
upon inhibition of undesirable tendencies in 
the training of the will has a certain warrant 
that will endure, since negation and prohibi- 
tion are necessary elements in the proper train- 
ing of the young. But the affirmative, or 
positive, side of character-forming is still more 
important; for, as we cultivate disposition 
through intelligence, so we shape character 
through disposition. 

All this means that we need a body of in- 
struction in which interest and volition may 
take root, and a doctrine of interest capable 
of being applied to the subject matter of 
instruction. 



PREFACE XI 

But interest, enthusiasm, mental attitude, and 
volitional habits are not the creation of a day ; 
they are the growth of years. For this reason, 
methods of teaching have a powerful influence 
in generating and developing them. The doc- 
trine of interest, therefore, finds its application 
in the field of methods as well as in that of 
knowdedge. 

The second, third, and fourth sections of this 
book are little more than restatements of the 
doctrine of interest advanced by Dr. Dewey, to 
whom the volume is inscribed. Considerable 
portions of Sections VI and VII have been 
printed, the former in The School and Home 
Journal and the latter in G-unton^s Blagazine. 
Several of the sections on Method owe much 
of their content and order to Baumeister's 
Handhuch, The author has received many 
helpful suggestions from Mr. Thomas D. Bol- 
ger, both in the revision of manuscript and in 
the correction of proofs. 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

I. How Interest arises among Primitive 

Men 1 

11. A More Fundamental Conception of 

Interest 11 

III. The Object of Interest. ... 20 

IV. The Personal or Subjective Side of 

Interest 28 

V. Interest and Elective Studies . . 44 

VI. Education, Interest, and Survival . 72 
VII. Interest, Motor Training, and the 

Modern City Child .... 85 
VIII. Relation of Interest to Methods of 

Teaching 116 

IX. Relation of the Teacher to his 

Methods 127 

X. Personal Elements in Instruction, — 

Speech — Tempo — Tone — Tension . 134 

XI. Concreteness in Instruction . . 141 



XII. Oral Presentation . 

XIII. The Art of Exposition . 

XIV. The Art of Questioning 
XV. Interest and Thinking . 

Index 



150 
165 
179 
205 

227 



INTEEEST AND EDUCATION 



HOW INTEREST ARISES AMONG PRIMITIVE 
MEN 

The term interest is a word in common 
use, and, like other words of its kind, may 
be variously interpreted. Primarily, the word 
would seem to indicate a state of feeling, yet 
it is often extended to the objects toward 
which the feeling extends ; thus a man may 
have interest in his business, and its objects 
may easily become his business interests. It 
often happens, however, that one is not inter- 
ested in what are his true interests. 

What does the word signify in education? 
If the teacher declares that the student must 
be interested, the inquiry at once arises, In- 
terested in what? There are good interests 
and bad interests. Play is a subject of un- 
questioned interest to children, so that perhaps 
to gain their interest in their studies we 



2 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

should turn the studies into play. Children 
are interested, too, in attaining pleasure and 
avoiding pain. Shall the teacher, therefore, 
attempt to convert all labor into pleasure ? 
Many teachers, having this conception of in- 
terest, contrast with it the doctrine of effort. 
They say that play spoils the mind for the 
serious business of life, leaving it interested 
only in selfish enjoyments, not at all in duties. 
Others, seeing the deadening effects that come 
through effort without interest, likewise con- 
demn the doctrine of effort as a guiding 
principle of school activities. The word in- 
terest^ therefore, appears undetermined when 
examined from the standpoint of its use in 
everyday life. 

It may perhaps assist us to free the mean- 
ing of the term from confusion, if we make 
a brief study of the feelings of a race still in 
a primitive condition. Let us suppose we 
have gone with Peary on one of his polar ex- 
peditions, and that we are trying to under- 
stand the actions, motives, and feelings of the 
Eskimo. We find them engaged upon the 
most elementary kinds of labor. Their prob- 



INTEREST AMONG PRIMITIVE MEN 3 

lems pertain to food, clothing, and shelter in 
their simplest forms. These people are little 
concerned with affairs of government, religion, 
or education. They have no police, no courts, 
no armies, no professional classes. Municipal 
problems do not puzzle their minds or vex 
their patience. Fire departments are not 
needed, for there is nothing to burn. Taxes 
are not levied, for there is no public service. 
Laws are unknown, since real property does 
not exist. There is, moreover, little personal 
property that could be stolen and there is no 
place of refuge for thieves. Transportation 
is hardly a problem except for the tribe ; mer- 
chants are unnecessary, since there is nothing 
to sell. We have here, in brief, a people for 
whom art, science, government, industrial so- 
ciety, religion, and education are either non- 
existent or in their most rudimentary forms. 
Eliminating thus at a stroke the complexities 
incident to a highly developed civilization, we 
are able to examine directly the primal sources 
of interest among men. 

Of the three objects of Eskimo activity, 
that of shelter is the least in importance, for, 



4 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

lacking loose stones, the igloo, or one-roomed 
hut in which the family dwells, is made of 
blocks of snow for walls and dome, with per- 
haps a block of ice for a window. The Eskimo 
lover need not hesitate to wed because he 
knows not where to house the bride. He can 
construct his igloo as easily as a bird can build 
her nest. What little fire the people use is 
made from animal fat, a by-product of the 
hunt. The two prime requisites for existence 
are, therefore, food, which is almost exclusively 
animal, and clothing, which is quite as exclu- 
sively furs. The two forms of activity about 
which everything turns in an Eskimo com- 
munity are, therefore, hunting or fishing by 
the men, and the making of fur clothing by 
the women. The objects of life are concrete, 
immediate, pressing. Existence itself is the 
stake for which each individual in such a com- 
munity works, and every act becomes charged 
with this intense interest. Food brings satis- 
faction and stores up energy for the getting 
of more food. Life is a circle about whose 
boundary is written hunger, cold (or the fear 
of them), energy, effort, food, clothing, satisfac- 



INTEREST AMONG PRIMITIVE MEN 5 

tion, more energy, and so on as long as the 
tribe exists. 

It should not be assumed that because every 
person in the group works with his life in his 
hand, so to speak, pain is the predominating 
note. So long as he has energy left, the hunter 
will enjoy his hunt, will glory in its risks and 
its triumphs. The exercise of his stored-up 
energy alone suffices to make him enjoy his 
work; and when to this source of pleasure we 
add prospective enjoyment of its fruits, and 
perhaps the somewhat aesthetic enjoyment aris- 
ing from a contemplation of goodly stores for 
the future, we can see that pleasure is not 
denied to man, even in the desolate and barren 
Northland. It is only when energy or hope 
fails that labor becomes a pain to the Eskimo.^ 

Like their sisters of more favored climes, the 
Eskimo women have the less strenuous duties 
of the household. Since their housekeeping is 
exceedingly simple, most of their time can be 
spent in the tanning of skins, and their manu- 
facture into clothing. The skins are rendered 

1 Compare Patten, "The Theory of Prosperity," Intro- 
duction, The Macmillan Co. 



6 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

flexible and durable by chewing. One can 
fancy a social group of women, each with a 
fold of a skin in her mouth, busily engaged, 
not in friendly communication, but in vigorous 
chewing, a useful even if not an exhilarating 
utilization of muscular power. But here again, 
divesting one's self of any prejudice against 
such labor caused by absence of need and op- 
portunity, one may conceive that even this 
labor is not a pain to the sturdy belles of the 
North, who are able to enjoy raw blubber as 
our maids enjoy sweetmeats. Then, again, as 
in the case of the man, there is the reward of 
warm sleeping-bag or sealskin jacket, to say 
nothing of the sesthetic enjoyment arising from 
supple skins and handsome fit. 

All the minor activities of the hut contribute 
to the main purpose of getting food and cloth- 
ing. The men and boys work at their kayaks, 
their spears, their nets, their arrows, their sleds 
and thongs. The very play of the children 
with the puppies contributes to their future 
power of survival. The women cut their thread 
from the skins and prepare their bone needles. 
Now and then a trifle of art appears in the 



INTEREST AMONG PRIMITIVE MEN 7 

way of adornment of dress or weapon. Not 
long since a hunter on Cayuga Lake shot a 
wild goose on its flight to the South. Im- 
bedded in its breast there stood a bone arrow- 
head, ornamented at one end by a few simple 
lines — mute witness to an art impulse in some 
untutored son of the distant North. 

It is like this with all primitive peoples. 

^,^ Their interests cluster about a few requisites^f* 
for survival. These requisites vary with the 
environment, as with that of the American In- 
dians, or of the denizens of tropical forests ; but 
whatever they are, they form the goal of all 

,:^^deavor, the centre of all interests. Moreover, 
the physical and mental satisfactions growing 
out of them lend to labors that to us would 
be repulsive, a joy that makes even such life 
worth living. / Much as we may deplore a 
primitive existence for men, because of its 
many deprivations, it would be an error to 
think of primitive life as one of drudgery, of 

^ hateful, hopeless toil. Weariness, pain, indeed, 
comes when energy is exhausted, but the idea 
of drudgery with adults belongs to a later 
social epoch. 



8 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

When society becomes divided into castes, 
such as nobles, warriors, priests, and laborers, 
and the upper classes exploit the lower, com- 
pelling the workers to support those who sit 
in idleness, or labor in non-productive ways, 
the primitive ends of labor such as exist 
with the Eskimo become remote. And when 
the laborer gets back directly only a moiety 
of the bread he produces, and when, moreover, 
his social status sinks because of his servile 
labor, then the direct connection between effort 
and survival is broken. The laborer becomes a 
serf, doing the will of another, and he is con- 
strained to accept contempt as a sauce to com- 
pulsion. He then works directly to ward off 
evils, and only indirectly to produce benefits. 
As will be more fully explained in a subsequent 
section, drudgery arises when interest in ends 
desired is not reflected in the labor that is being 
performed. At times drudgery is endured by 
all persons, young or old ; yet it is hardly a ( 
prevailing state, except with those who endure 
some form of slavery. A prisoner of war 
chained to a seat as a galley-slave, or a criminal 
breaking stone upon a turnpike, would be en- 



INTEREST AMONG PRIMITIVE MEN 9 

gaged in what would seem pure drudgery, even 
though such activity might be preferred to 
idleness in solitary confinement. Serfdom of 
any sort produces drudgery;/ an eagle caged 
longs for freedom, even though a king be his 
jailer, j The serf's life is spent in what has 
been termed a pain economy,^ which may be 
defined as a state of society in which the chief 
motive to action is the avoidance of pain or of 
enemies, and in which men work only indirectly 
for the requisites for survival. The feudal 
system is an example on a large scale of a 
pain economy. The laborer became the serf 
of the feudal lord, ready to till his land, defend 
his castle, or be his man. He did all this that 
he might have food, however scanty and poor, 
and shelter and clothing, however mean, from 
the man who owned the land and controlled 
the agencies of production. Under such cir- 
cumstances, the idea of drudgery, or pain from 
labor whose product the laborer could not hope 
to enjoy, would naturally arise. Besides the 
meagreness of the return from the work, the 
laborer had his food seasoned with the salt 
1 See Patten, "Development of English Thought," p. 8. 



10 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

of social degradation. In such cases interest 
is necessarily negative in character. The old 
joy in production, found where men work for 
themselves, gives way to the passive endurance 
of the man who works for another upon com- 
pulsion. 

From the foregoing analysis, we may con- 
clude that interest arises primarily from the 
activities put forth by men to secure the req- 
uisites for their physical survival. Consump- 
tion of goods produces satisfaction and renews 
energy for further production. Pain arises 
only when energy fails, or when that which 
should conduce to the survival of one individ- 
ual is forcibly diverted to another. Drudgery 
as a permanent status of a people is the off- 
spring of serfdom. 



/■ 



II 



A MORE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTION OF 
INTEREST 

It might be thought that the presence of 
objects is enough to arouse interest in them. 
Yet if this were true, it is difficult to see 
why the same objects should arouse interest 
in some and aversion in others, while still 
others may remain indifferent. Evidently the 
objects, at least among primitive men, would 
have to have some perceived relation to sur- 
vival. It did not take the American Indian 
long to become interested in firearms, so inti- 
mately were these seen to be related to 
his survival, whether game or enemies were 
considered. But even to this day the uncivil- 
ized Indian remains indifferent to agricultural 
machinery. 

On the other hand, it might be thought that 
the mind through its own activity creates ideals 
of objects and then becomes interested in them. 
11 



12 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

But this ignores the function of instinctive 
action to secure survival, as in the case of 
fear or hunger, the mating instinct, and the 
like. Each of these suppositions is one-sided. 
A more adequate conception of the group of 
psychical states known as impulse, desire, 
interest, volition, is that the self is seeking 
through its own activity to express or realize 
itself. At first this effort at self-expression is, 
as we have seen, merely a doing of the things 
that lead to physical survival. But as life 
broadens, and something more than food and 
clothing becomes necessary for those forms of 
survival that we prize, the field for self-active 
expression constantly widens, so that, with the 
growth of new ideals, new motives to action 
appear, new interests absorb the mind. In 
other words, the interest that was once instinc- 
tive becomes conscious, and is directed by 
intelligence. 

The idea of self-expression is of far-reaching 
significance, both for the development of the 
individual mind, and for the development of 
civilization itself. Our instincts and impulses 
are products of heredity. Long ages of struggle 



FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTION OF INTEREST 13 

for existence have implanted in us the result- 
ants, so to speak, of the qualities of mind that 
have in the past been necessary for survival. 
One set of impulses pertains to food, another 
to the avoidance of dangers, another to the 
perpetuation of the race. To these primitive 
impulses leading to survival, we add many 
others from the higher aspects of human life, 
like curiosity to know, response to beauty, 
reverence for what is good and noble. Many 
of the impulses that were forhierly useful in 
securing survival are now unimportant, and 
may properly be ignored. This is especially 
true of our fears. Dr. G. Stanley Hall has 
discovered that children are subject to some 
298 fears, most of which relate to bodily pres- 
ervation. It is needless to say that under 
the conditions of modern civilization most of 
these fears are groundless, and should be over- 
come. " What casts out fear ? " asks Dr. Hall ; 
"love, which is the opposite. Children fear 
night, trees, thunder and lightning, bugs and 
snakes, and many other objects of nature. 
Teach them to love these things, that is, to 
feel an interest in them. When we have love 



14 INTEKEST AND EDUCATION 

distributed over all things in the world that 
are worthy of being loved, then we have 
education." 

Professor Davidson ^ conceives education to be 
the process of transforming the original nature 
of man into his ideal nature. According to 
this view, the history of mankind is no more 
than the record of different races in this process 
of development. In his original nature, a man 
would, perhaps, not differ from a lion in the 
general purpose of his self-expression ; he 
would be fierce in his aggression when seek- 
ing food ; he would be playful when comfort- 
able, angry when crossed in his natural desires ; 
in short, he would be merely one of many in a 
struggle for existence in which the welfare of 
the one might mean the detriment of the 
others. But in realizing his ideal nature, a 
man transforms this original selfish struggle 
for his individual welfare into cooperative ac- 
tivities in which he best conserves his own 
welfare by taking thought for that of others. 
In short, he transfers his activities from an 

1 See Introduction to "The Education of the Greek 
People," D. Appleton & Co. 



FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTION OF INTEREST 15 

animal to a social economy. Even primitive 
men, like the Eskimo, work together for com- 
mon ends. This social economy in its highest 
expression involves all that we know by the 
name of industrial cooperation, education, ethics, 
altruism, and religion. Whatever the individual 
does, therefore, he does to realize or express 
some aspect of himself. This mental activity, 
taking root first in the instincts and impulses 
of the physical nature, and developing into con- 
scious desire for the realization of certain ends, 
is at bottom nothing but the effort to express 
self in accordance with the varying ideals im- 
planted by physical nature or developed by 
growing insight into the ideal nature of the 
man. 

The complexity of this idea of self-expres- 
sion is seen when we consider the multiplicity 
of the ends with which a man may identify 
himself. Every man has many selves: he is a 
hierarchy of me's, as Professor James ^ calls him. 
" In its widest possible sense," he says, " a man's 
Me is the sum total of all that he can call his, 
not only his body and his psychic powers, but 
1 See "Psychology, Briefer Course," pp. 176-216. 



16 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

ills clothes and his house, his wife and children, 
his ancestors and friends, his reputation and 
works, his lands and horses, his yacht and bank 
account. All these things give him the same 
emotions. If they wax and prosper, he feels 
triumphant; if they dwindle and die, he feels 
cast down, not necessarily in the same degree for 
each thing, but in much the same way for all." 
Each man is at once a material me, a social 
me, and a spiritual me, and when he is working 
for any phase of any one of these, we may say 
that he is expressing himself. When these 
selves come into competition, as, for instance, 
when a man must decide which he will satisfy 
first, his own appetite or that of his children, 
we may still say that he is expressing himself, 
no matter which aspect of himself may prevail, 
and notwithstanding the fact that we dis- 
criminate between his higher and his lower self. 
Professor James says again, with respect to 
the rivalry and conflict of the different me's: 
"With most objects of desire, physical nature 
restricts our choice to but one of the many 
represented goods, and even so it is here. I 
am often confronted by the necessity of stand- 



FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTION OF INx^REST 17 

ing by one of my empirical selves and relin- 
quishing the rest. Not that I would not, if 
I could, be both handsome and fat, and well 
dressed, and a great athlete, and make a million 
a year ; be a wit, a hon vivant^ and a lady-killer, 
as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, 
statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as 
well as a 'tone-poet' and saint. But the thing 
is simply impossible. The millionnaire's work 
would run counter to the saint's ; the ho7i vivant 
and the philanthropist would trip each other 
up; the philosopher and the lady-killer could 
not well keep house in the same tenement 
of clay. Such different characters may con- 
ceivably at the outset of life be alike possible 
to man. But to make any one of them 
actual, the rest must more or less be sup- 
pressed. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, 
deepest self must review the list carefully, 
and pick out the one on which to stake his 
salvation. All other selves thereupon become 
unreal, but the fortunes of this self are real. 
Its failures are real failures, its triumphs real 
triumphs, carrying shame and gladness with 
them." 



18 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

It will be seen from the foregoing that the 
idea of self-expression is as broad as the con- 
ception of self. The essential point is that 
the activity in which we are interested pro- 
ceeds from within. Its source is internal ; its 
expression is outgoing. With the Eskimo 
the cycle — energy, goods, consumption, more 
energy — pertains to the things that preserve 
his physical existence ; with an artist the 
cycle — energy, artistic production, sesthetic 
satisfaction, renewed energy — pertains to a 
higher aspect of the self, which may emerge 
when the lower is provided for. Let the 
artist become hungry and cold, or shabby in 
dress, however, and he will revert to the cycle 
of the Eskimo, even though he hunts a cus- 
tomer rather than a seal. 

j We may say in general that interest is 
a feeling that accompanies the idea of self- 
expression. It has its origin in the^' exhilara- 
tion, the sense of power, of mastery, that goes 
with every internally impelled effort to realize a 
condition for the survival of the self, whether 
such survival touch one aspect of the man or 
another. Interest is therefore dynamic in char- 



FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTION OF INTEREST 19 

acter. It has its primary root in inherited im- 
pulse. We have impulses to eat, to run, to 
hunt, to work, to talk, to play, to avoid 
dangers, to seek pleasures. But these impulses 
with modern men, as with primitive peoples, 
are always directed toward some object, in the 
approach of which we find the realization of 
some aspect of our mental or physical being. 
There is, as Dr. Dewey says, no break between 
the impulse and the self ; for the impulse is 
nothing more than an involuntary, and per- 
haps almost unconscious, effort at self-expres- 
sion. 



Ill 

THE OBJECT OF INTEREST 

In primitive life the object of interest stands 
in close relation to the conditions for survival, 
and so standing is unmistakable. But it is 
just as plain that in our own daily life interest 
must have an object toward which the self 
'Strives. The artist is interested indeed in his 
own artistic result, the picture ; but he is 
likewise interested in everything that con- 
tributes to the result, — his brushes, his paints 
and their mixing, his canvas, the light in his 
study, the pose of his model. He is, in short, 
interested in every object or act that pertains 
to his self-realization as an artist in the par- 
ticular picture upon which he happens to be 
working. It is not art in general, the mere 
idea of art as an abstraction, that chains his 
attention, but the actual ends which he sets 
before himself, and the means which he con- 
ceives as necessary to the accomplishment of 

20 



THE OBJECT OF INTEREST 21 

these ends. These are all definite objects to 
which his interest attaches. The business man 
is not interested in abstractions, but in the 
quantity and quality of goods, in the markets, 
the supply, the demand, how his goods com- 
pare in quality and price with those of his 
neighbors, how he can attract trade by giving 
or seeming to give the most possible for a 
certain price. The clergyman is interested in 
his congregation, in the individual souls whose 
eternal welfare he would promote, in his 
church, his pulpit, his salary, his sermon. This 
is necessarily true, for it is the object alone 
that gives meaning to the activity. The self 
does not run like an empty mill, producing 
nothing, seeking no product ; but it is the 
object which shows to consciousness the quality 
of the impulse. It gives meaning to the ac- 
tivity. Impulse itself is said to be blind; it 
is the object that helps to make it intelligent. 
We must not make the error of supposing that 
the object comes first, thus calling the activity 
into being. The artist's materials would not 
interest the physician. He would regard them 
as so much rubbish, obstacles, perhaps, to self- 



22 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

expression. Nor would a case of surgical 
instruments, as such, interest the artist. As 
contemplated, they probably would be regarded 
with indifference. If by mistake they were 
substituted for his own implements, they would 
be regarded as obstacles to self-expression, 
hence with aversion. His only interest in them 
would be to remove them. But the thought 
of self-expression comes first; then the artist's 
materials are objects of interest to him because 
aids to self-expression. The thought of re- 
lieving suffering by surgical operations is the 
conception the surgeon has of liis own self- 
realization, and his instruments as aids to such 
realization become at once objects of interest. 
A toy to a child is a matter of indifference 
except as it aids him to realize some form of 
self-expression in his play. It then becomes 
a means to enable him to realize himself in 
play, and as such, is an object of interest. 

Thus far the situations that have been in- 
stanced have all been direct, or immediate, in 
character. In the case of the Eskimo spearing 
a walrus, or the artist moulding a statue, the 
object pursued has been one of intimate, con- 



THE OBJECT OF INTEREST 23 

Crete self-expression in the struggle for ex- 
istence, — in the one case physical, in the other 
artistic. But in the school the object sought 
often seems wofully remote from any analogous 
self-expression on the part of the pupil. The 
learning of a grammar lesson or the translation 
of a Latin sentence may seem as remote from 
real life as self-denial now is from heaven here- 
after. It may not seem to the pupil that he 
is doing this work for himself. He may feel 
no inner need, no impulse to self-expression, 
that urges him on to accomplishment. The 
fact that the school period has not been 
regarded as a part of life, but rather as 
a preparation for subsequent life, has led to 
the view that study performs a purely instru- 
mental function, that it simply prepares the 
pupil to do something in the future. 

This gap between the impulse to self- 
expression and the realization of it in any 
way the pupil can understand, has, in con- 
junction with some of our inherited notions 
about the effort essential to work, led to two 
antithetic theories of the means to be adopted 
to get the work done. One theory, that of 



24 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

effort, maintains that the sheer dead lift of 
will is the only sure means of getting the child 
to the goal, and the only way whereby his mind 
can be trained to do the hard things that are 
sure to confront him in later life. The other 
theory, that of pleasurable excitation, holds 
that it is only by making the object interesting 
that the mind will work freely and without 
constraint. The advocate of effort would drive 
his pupil to the object to be accomplished; 
that of pleasure would allure him to it. The 
one would compel, the other coax. Dr. Dewey 
has portrayed at length the arguments pro 
and con for these two theories under the guise 
of an educational lawsuit, in his monograph 
on " Interest as related to Will." ^ 

There is a common error underlying the 
two antithetic doctrines that effort on the one 
hand and mere pleasure on the other should 
be the motives to action. The error lies in 
ignoring the conception that all effort for the 
realization of an end is an effort at self- 
expression, and in assuming that it is an 
effort to attain some object quite external to 
1 University of Cliicago Press. 



THE OBJECT OF INTEREST 25 

the self. It is evident that, if the object is 
thus external to the self, it must be made 
interesting if pleasure is to be an exciting 
cause of activity, or effort must be expended 
if the object is to be attained without such 
pleasurable excitation. As Dr. Dewey points 
out, when either effort alone or pleasure alone 
is made the motive to action, there is neces- 
sarily a divided attention in the pupil. In 
the case of effort, there is mechanical attention 
to the matter in hand sufficient to satisfy the 
teacher, or perhaps to attain the end; but 
there is accompanying this mechanical attention 
a mind-wandering in accordance with the sub- 
jective interests that may be present at the 
time. The boy may be apparently attending to 
his lesson either in recitation or in study, and 
at the same time have a running consciousness 
of ball games, hunting or fishing, or gathering 
nuts or making windmills or water-wheels, 
or whatever form of amusement may happen 
to be present to his thoughts. His mind thus 
alternates between his pleasures and the me- 
chanical activity aroused by the teacher's 
demands. On the other hand, if an object 



26 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

is external to the self-expression of the child, 
another teacher may seek to secure his atten- 
tion to it by making the object pleasurable. 
The object has to be made interesting, but 
the attention aroused is not due to true inter- 
est. ■ It is due rather to a transient pleasurable 
excitement. Baldwin says that, whereas inter- 
ests are stimuli to voluntary attention, 'affects' 
are stimuli to involuntary attention. When, 
objects have to be made interesting, it is evi- 
dent that the involuntary attention is appealed 
to. The activity is not truly one of self- 
expression, though it may be very intense for 
the time being. As soon as the excitation 
ceases, attention and interest flag, so that there 
is a sort of oscillation between excitement 
and apathy. In the case of effort, the divided 
attention is simultaneous; in the other, it is suc- 
cessive, being an alternation of alert attention 
and indifference. The conception of work- 
ing to attain ends as a manifestation of self- 
expression completely solves these difficulties, 
whether they are of a merely practical or of a 
psychological nature. If the object is external 
to the self, then the mind may, like a top, be 



THE OBJECT OF INTEREST 2T 

whipped into activity by pleasurable excitement 
or by painful anticipation. In either case, we 
have a serious split in the activity of the mind 
itself. But if the attainment of an end is truly 
an expression of self, even of the self tempo- 
rarily or unworthily conceived, then we can 
find in interest a complete reconciliation of the 
antithesis between effort and allurement. For 
a genuine interest is nothing but the feeling 
that accompanies this identification of the self 
through action with some object or idea. In 
this case, effort becomes the result of interest, 
and interest becomes the consciousness of the 
value of the end and of the means necessary 
to reach it. 



IV 



THE PERSONAL OR SUBJECTIVE SIDE OF 
INTEREST 1 

1. Intey^est a Feeling of Worth. — Interest, it 
has already been said, is a feeling. This, like 
all feelings, is not to be defined. It is only to 
be felt. More precisely, it is a feeling of the 
worth, to the self, of an end to be attained. 
The subjective side of the artist's interest is 
the constant feeling that self-expression in the 
form of art is of value to him. Perhaps it is 
regarded as the greatest thing in the world. 
All professional interest on its subjective side 
involves this same feeling of worth. To 
mend the broken law is the greatest thing in 
the world to the lawyer ; to mend the broken 
body is the most worthy form of self-expres- 
sion to the physician ; to heal the broken and 
contrite heart, to mend the broken moral law, 

1 This section and, in a measure, the two preceding sec- 
tions are a restatement of Dr. Dewey's theory of interest. 
(See his " Interest as related to Will.") 
28 



SUBJECTIVE SIDE OF INTEREST 29 

to save the souls of the perishing, is the 
most worthy thing of all to the minister. To 
the politician, interest in politics is a sense 
of worth to the self arising from party ser- 
vice. To the statesman, to serve one's coun- 
try is the noblest form of self-expression. To 
the soldier, self-expression in the form of 
courageous deeds may go to the extent of 
self-extinction. The sense of worth in this 
form of self-expression may exceed the worth 
even of life itself. 

2. Immediate vs. mediate interest. — We need 
at this point to make a further subdivision of 
the subject according as the ends and means 
of expression coincide in time or not. In all 
cases of immediate interest, there is no break 
between the end of self-expression and the 
act of self-expression, for the act is the end 
and the end is the act. The best illustration 
of this is perhaps play. Every child has a 
natural impulse to realize itself in this form of 
activity. So universal is the instinct of play, 
that it is common to the young of almost 
all animals, as well as to children. There is 
no thought here of effort, and no thought of 



30 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

pleasure, for the activity is the end in itself. 
When a game is over, the end is accom- 
plished, the self has been expressed, the pleas- 
ure has been experienced. Although children 
put forth great effort in their play and expe- 
rience great pleasure in it, yet we can easily 
see that the end and the means coincide in 
time; that they fuse the one into the other, 
so that it is only by a logical analysis that 
we can distinguish the end from the means. 
There are forms, moreover, of sesthetic enjoy- 
ment in which the same thing is true. To an 
observer, the end of the music is the hearing 
of the music. The purpose of a picture is 
the enjoyment of its contemplation. It is 
conceivable, of course, that one might listen 
to music for the sake of imitating it, that one 
might study a picture in order to copy it; 
but in all cases of contemplative enjoyment 
of art, the end and the means likewise fuse. 
They coincide in time and are only to be 
distinguished in thought. 

In most cases, especially in educational 
activities, the end and the means do not coin- 
cide in time. The realizing of self in a given 



SUBJECTIVE SIDE OF INTEREST 31 

end, as in the possession of material objects 
or the acquisition of knowledge, is usually an 
extended process. In the case of the sculptor, 
the self must be mediated with the end to be 
attained by a series of exercises, before the 
perfect statue can be produced. There must 
be a long series of activities intervening be- 
tween the idea of the end and its realization. 
The figure must be modelled in clay and then 
chiselled out from the marble. So, in the 
school, the task set before the pupil can be 
accomplished only by a series of intervening 
activities. It is at this point that the one- 
sided theories about interest and effort appear. 
One party, thinking only of the emotional 
side, identifies pleasure with interest; the 
other, thinking only of the intellectual phase, 
identifies volition with effort. It is evident, 
moreover, that education is chiefly concerned 
with the doctrine of mediate interests. When- 
ever the object to be attained is a reality 
only as an idea, the end and the means 
necessarily fall apart. It is at this point that 
we come to the distinction between drudgery 
and work. 



32 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

3. Drudgery and Work. — The mind must 
have some sort of interest in the thought of 
realizing itself, or expressing itself by attain- 
ing a certain end, whether that end pertain to 
physical well-being or aesthetic satisfaction or 
intellectual attainment. But the object to be 
attained being only an idea, it is evident that 
self-expression requires a series of intervening 
activities. If the interest in the end alone 
remains and no interest attaches to the means, 
then we have drudgery. If, however, the 
interest attaching to the end is present also in 
the means for reaching the end, then we have 
work. It is conceivable that the workman may 
have great interest in the dollar he is to 
receive for his day's wages, and yet be indif- 
ferent to, or detest, the labor itself, which is 
the means for reaching the dollar. In this 
case we would have drudgery. Many forms 
of routine work conform to this idea. The 
housewife may grow sick of the drudgery of 
washing dishes, of sweeping floors, of mending 
garments; for, though the end to be attained 
is seen to be a necessary and desirable one, 
the interest naturally attaching to the end 



SUBJECTIVE SIDE OF INTEREST 33 

to be attained is often not attached to the 
means for attaining it. A workman in a 
modern factory may spend eight hours a day, 
year in, year out, in turning a piece of iron 
into a certain shape. Though he may have 
an interest in the perfect bicycle which is to 
be produced or in winning his daily bread, 
it is conceivable that he should have no inter- 
est in this dull routine of labor, which would 
then partake of the nature of pure drudgery. 
In the same way, a pupil may have a direct 
or an indirect interest in learning a grammar 
lesson, or solving a problem in arithmetic, or 
performing any other one of the school duties, 
yet have no interest at all in the means for 
accomplishing this phase of self-expression. 
School work to such a one is drudgery. 

If, however, the interest naturally attaching 
to the end of self-expression can be carried 
over into the means for reaching this end, we 
have work, not drudgery. In play, as we 
saw, the end and the means coincide ; but in 
work, they do not. Work may be as enjoy- 
able as play, but the quality of the enjoyment 
in the work is different from that in play. 



34 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

because of this separation of means and end. 
A workman in a modern factory, though he 
labors faithfully and well to earn his money 
and yet has no interest in his daily activity, 
for whom, in short, drudgery takes the place 
of true work, may, perhaps, be called an 
artisan, though the word does not necessarily 
mean one who substitutes drudgery for work. 
Another, to whom the interest in the end 
attaches equally to the means for reaching 
the end, may be called an artist. He speaks 
of the joy of work rather than of its pain. 
In the case of the sculptor, for example, how 
keen an interest attaches to every stroke of 
the mallet; with what passion does he de- 
velop his idea, forgetting even food and 
friends in the intensity of his interest in his 
work! It is said of Edison, the electrician, 
that he becomes so interested in his problems 
that he will spend hours and even days in 
total isolation from others, denying himself 
food and companionship, so intense is the 
interest with which he pursues his ideals. 
No drudge can do that. The teacher, too, 
should be an artist rather than a drudge; so 



SUBJECTIVE SIDE OF INTEREST 35 

that every new day, every new situation, will 
be a new stimulus to renewed effort. To be 
a true artist, however, is not for every teacher, 
not for any teacher at all times. To enable 
the pupil to approximate the artistic attitude 
toward his school work, even for brief inter- 
mittent periods, is an accomplishment of the 
few; yet it is an end for which we must all 
strive. 

The idea that drudgery is an inevitable 
concomitant of school work receives encour- 
agement from two sources already mentioned; 
namely, that of servile labor, and that of 
regarding the school solely as a place of prepa- 
ration for post-academic activity. The labor 
of the serf contributes not directly, but only 
indirectly and partially, to his survival. It 
expresses, not himself, but another. To this 
separation of self from activity there comes 
an added indignity, in that his social status is 
degraded just because he serves another from 
compulsion. The idea of slavish drudgery 
once introduced, it is not unnatural that the 
mass of society should look upon it as a nec- 
essary consequence of living in a vale of 



36 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

tears, and that many should think their chil- 
dren uneducated unless they are made to 
wear this badge of servitude. Again, since 
the school is not engaged in productive labor 
having an immediate relation to the pressing 
conditions of survival, it is easy to fall into 
the habit of thinking that all school activity 
must of necessity be merely preparatory to 
real activity at a subsequent period. This 
being the case, one may take the position 
most native to his type of mind, either that 
the pupil must drudge for his results, or that 
he may be allowed to reach them through 
external attractions. As a matter of fact, how- 
ever, neither of these positions is tenable. 

4. Desire and Effort. — Desire and effort 
are correlatives in properly mediated interest. 
That is, an analysis of interest proper will 
disclose both of these elements. In play, 
where the activity is the end, there can be 
no question of desire or effort. For, though 
one may desire to play, one does not think 
of this desire when actually playing. Play 
as a distant end is to be distinguished from 
play as an activity now proceeding. Further- 



SUBJECTIVE SIDE OF INTEREST 37 

more, although play often calls forth the 
greatest physical exertion, the player does not 
put forth conscious effort. Whenever so-called 
play becomes an object of effort, it loses its 
proper character, since it becomes a task. 

Effort is really the process of trying to 
realize an end through work. Desire is the 
tendency of the energies to push on to ac- 
complish the object of effort. Effort, there- 
fore, is really an evidence of desire. These 
two things, effort and desire, are consequently 
only two aspects of one thing, two phases of 
self-expression, when the end to be attained 
and the means for reaching it are separate. 
These two ideas are so important in the 
doctrine of interest that we shall need to 
examine them more in detail. 

5. Nature of Desire. — We often speak of 
blind appetite, or passion. By this we mean 
\ a form of desire not controlled by an intelli- 
gent aim. Whenever this form of activity 
gains control of the mind, there is wasted 
energy. In the life economy of the animal 
kingdom, the long process of evolution has 
directed these blind appetites or passions 



38 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

toward the well-being of the animal. If a 
deer or a rabbit is timid, then timidity has 
become a condition of existence. One is 
often amazed at the fierce anger shown 
by a tiger or a lion in overcoming its prey. 
Yet, unquestionably, this anger is one of the 
factors which determines the existence of the 
animal. Without the anger it might be that 
courage would be lacking to attack formi- 
dable beasts of prey; that, should the easier 
means of procuring subsistence become ex- 
hausted, the animal would perish from hunger. 
Evolution in the animal world has brought 
about, therefore, a somewhat permanent har- 
mony between the appetites and passions of 
the beasts and the survival of these creatures 
in the struggle for existence. With children, 
however, we can hardly claim that there is 
such a harmony due to the process of evolu- 
tion, for man has so long been a social being 
that the primitive evolutionary forces have 
practically ceased to act. Anger and rage, 
or timidity and fear, therefore, to a child, 
usually mean, not the conditions of existence, 
but the waste of energy. It is so long since 



SUBJECTIVE SIDE OF INTEREST 39 

the race in its normal life has had to fear 
external dangers, that the function of fear has 
ceased to be a condition for existence. There 
is all the more reason, therefore, why the 
desires of the human being should be ration- 
alized by being directed to proper ends and 
mediated by interest. 

The nature of emotion, of which desire is a 
phase, may be defined as the tension arising 
from the difficulty of effecting an adjustment 
between means and end. Its function is to stir 
up the efforts of the individual. If the struggle 
for wealth or place or honor arouses no emotion 
in a man, it is probable that his desire will 
remain mere wish. With repetition the emo- 
tional tension is likely to be transformed into 
habitual action. The constant repetition of 
those activities which mediate between the self 
and the end it desires to accomplish may cause 
the desires to lose their emotional tone. In 
this case, habit takes the place of conscious 
effort. 

The normal outcome is a proper balance 
between excitation and ideal. Where this bal- 
ance is lacking, we have either weakness or 



40 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

excess in action. The man who has become 
blase is one who has ceased to pursue the ends 
of life with emotional vigor. The world has 
become a squeezed orange to him, nothing is 
worth while. His emotions are washed out, his 
interests feeble and fleeting, his actions mechan- 
ical and lifeless. On the other hand, where the 
excitation is powerful, where the end appears to 
the mind with tumultuous vigor, where there 
is no proper mediation, no calming influence 
of persistent interests, there we are likely to 
have what Professor James calls "the explo- 
sive will." 1 

What has been said of the nature of emotion 
holds likewise of desire, which is only a phase 
of the emotional tension, since, in addition to 
the emotion, it includes a clear consciousness of 
the end to be attained. 

6. Selfish Indulgence. — In selfish indulgence, 
desire is made an end in itself. It loses its 
function as a stage in the mediation between 
the self as it is and the self as it would be in 
some future stage of expression. The chronic 
novel reader is one in whom the normal desire 
1 "Psychology, Briefer Course," p. 437. 



SUBJECTIVE SIDE OF INTEREST 41 

for information or the rational desire for self- 
development has degenerated into making 
pleasurable excitement the sole end of reading. 
Hence he devours novel after novel with noth- 
ing in view but the joys and woes of imaginary 
heroines. The glutton is one in whom the 
normal desire for food as a means for the pres- 
ervation of strength has degenerated into a 
love of eating for eating's sake. The drunkard 
is one in whom pure self-indulgence has taken 
the place of whatever rational ends men have 
ever sought to serve by drinking. 

7. Pleasure and Desire. — The pleasure natu- 
rally associated with desire is due to a contem- 
plation of the end to be attained. This pleasure 
in turn contributes to the efficiency of the mind 
in reaching the end. It is only in self-indul- 
gence that pleasure is ever made the end of 
action. Not a little confusion has arisen in the 
course of the development of human thought 
from confounding pleasure as an end and 
pleasure as a means of self-expression. It 
is only the latter that can properly be 
said to be the end of desire. One class of 
thinkers, conceiving of pleasure as the end of 



42 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

self-activity, have naturally made it a rule of 
conduct. Even the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence suggests this doctrine, where it says "that 
all men are endowed by their Creator with cer- 
tain inalienable rights : that among these rights 
are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." 
Another class, holding the same view with 
regard to pleasure as the end of action, have 
thought it necessary in the interests of morality 
to eliminate this motive entirely from the moral 
law. This is the position taken by Kant in his 
" Critique of Practical Reason." Each of these 
theories is defective from a common error, since 
each regards desire and the pleasure accompany- 
ing it as prior to, or outside of, volition. The 
relation of desire to will is seen only when 
desire is conceived as a stage in volition. In 
the words of Dr. Dewey, " The development of 
desire into interest marks the happy solution of 
the whole question." 

8. Desire and Interest. — Normal desire is 
properly mediated interest, for interest shows 
that the aroused emotional force is doing its 
work, performing its proper function. The great 
problem in all human activity is to get the 



SUBJECTIVE SIDE OF INTEREST 43 

right balance between impulse and end. Inter- 
est marks this balance. As Dr. Dewey says, 
" Interest is impulse functioning with reference 
to an idea of self-expression." 

It is one of the offices of interest to calm and 
steady the over tumultuous desires. With all 
frontiersmen it is a well-known fact that the young 
hunter, when he first comes face to face with a 
stag, is likely to have what is called " buck 
fever." His mind is so intent upon the end, the 
bringing down of the game, that he loses proper 
control of his muscles; his whole body trembles, 
his aim is unsteady, the result being that the 
deer usually escapes. But with training it is 
possible for the hunter to mediate this desire by 
giving proper attention to the means for ac- 
complishing the end desired. In the Leather- 
stocking Tales, the great hero, Natty Bumpo, 
is pictured as a man having absolute control of 
his actions, even in the most exciting and peril- 
ous moments. His wits are always about him. 
When there is need of haste, there is with 
this hero instantaneous activity, with proper 
attention to the means for accomplishing the 
desired end. 



INTEREST AND ELECTIVE STUDIES 

Iisr utilizing the doctrine of interest as a 
regulative principle in the selection of studies, 
hence in determining the curriculum for in- 
dividuals, there is an illuminating distinction 
that should always be kept in mind; it is the 
distinction between clear ideas and vivid ideas. 

A clear idea is one that produces inner 
illumination without the tendency to release 
energy. It shows us the likenesses and dif- 
ferences of the things about us, but does not 
stimulate us to do things. Patients recover- 
ing from the effects of nitrous oxide are said 
to have wondrous visions of what seems to 
them absolute truth, the soul being illumi- 
nated by a flood of all-revealing light. This 
is the clear idea at its highest estate. 

A vivid idea is one that tends to pass into 
action. It stirs up and releases energy ; it is 
charged with emotion ; it pulsates with the 
44 



INTEREST AND ELECTIVE STUDIES 45 

feelings that attach themselves to vital inter- 
ests. Though vivid ideas may also be clear, 
their predominating quality is their tendency 
toward motor expression. If the function of 
clear ideas is to produce inner illumination, 
that of vivid ideas is to effect results in the 
world of eventSo 

Note. — Though this use of the words clear and vivid 
may seem unusual to some, yet the etymology of the 
terms appears to justify the distinction. That is clear 
which is pellucid, transparent, unobscured, free from 
confusion, comprehensible. In none of these attributes 
is there a suggestion of emotion, or a reference to sub- 
jective valuation. Clearness appears to signify mere 
inner illumination. The word vivid, on the other hand, 
shows by its derivation from vivere, vita, that it relates 
to what is alive, spirited, active, vital. It suggests feel- 
ing, personality, interest. To vivify is to endue with life, 
to enliven, to inspire. Vividness is therefore not merely 
an added degree of clearness ; it is a distinct quality that 
an idea acquires by its perceived relation to life. 

Men at work in the real situations of life 
always have vivid ideas, for they are meeting, 
or striving to meet, the conditions that de- 
termine their business or professional sur- 
vival. One man strives to succeed as a teacher, 
a preacher, a doctor, or a lawyer ; another as a 



46 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

merchant, an exporter, or an industrial pro- 
ducer. About every calling there clusters 
a group of vivid ideas having the power to 
awaken all the potential energies of those to 
whom they are vivid. Such ideas are the 
source of genuine interest. Not all ideas, how- 
ever, are vivid to all men. Unless a man 
has need of a surgeon, ideas about surgery 
can at best be clear. They may have a curi- 
ous, speculative interest for him, but they 
awaken no emotion, stimulate no energies, lead 
to no actions; for they touch upon no condi- 
tion underlying his success in life. 

Turning now to the school for the applica- 
tion of these distinctions, we find that all 
primitive people educate their children by 
means of vivid ideas alone. The educational 
activities of the Eskimo child all have direct 
relation to his future life-work in getting 
food and producing clothing. Before the 
days of the book in Greece, it was parti- 
cipation in life that prepared for life. In 
the early days of Rome, the education of the 
son of a freeman consisted of two things, — 
physical training as a preparation for war, 



INTEREST AND ELECTIVE STUDIES 47 

and the learning of the twelve tables of the 
laws as a preparation for civil life at home 
and the inculcation of civil life among bar- 
barian peoples. Even when the higher intel- 
lectual life was restricted to a few callings, as 
in education for the church or for knighthood, 
or for discovering and propagating ancient 
learning, ideas which to most are now at 
best only clear, were then vivid. 

But now that education has become uni- 
versal, and occupations vastly diversified, the 
schools are attempting to supply an educa- 
tion that shall prepare for everything in gen- 
eral and nothing in particular. In doing this 
they have more and more displaced vivid ideas 
by those that are merely clear, because of sup- 
posed universal validity. But such a plan 
postpones vivid ideas to the concluding stages 
of education, where they are least needed, and 
eliminates them largely from the earlier stages, 
where they are most needed. It is evident, 
therefore, that vividness should not be ignored 
when studies are to be selected. 

The answer to the question, What shall 
our students study? depends upon the func- 



48 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

tion the school, and especially the high 
school, is supposed to perform. As men differ 
regarding the nature of education, so they 
differ as to the purpose of the school. I 
venture to quote with approval the statement 
made by the venerated scientist, Lord Kelvin, 
in an address to the students of Cornell 
University. "The higher education," he said, 
" has two purposes, — first, to enable the 
student to earn a livelihood, and, second, to 
make life worth living." In an industrial 
democracy, neither of these purposes must 
be neglected, even though the studies lying 
closest to livelihood are the most vivid. With 
a dominant land and slave-owning oligarchy, as 
in Greece, or with a limited religious body as 
in the Middle Ages, it was not necessary for 
education to concern itself with industrial 
thrift. Even in the times of Erasmus, edu- 
cated men were hardly expected to earn their 
own living, but were led to depend upon the 
class of men who then endowed scholars as 
they now endow schools. Being freed from 
all obligation to teach the masses how to earn 
their daily bread, the school could have a cur- 



INTEREST AND ELECTIVE STUDIES 49 

riculum whose single aim was to raise the 
individual into the realms of culture deemed 
most desirable by the age. 

The Greek ideal of art, philosophy, and 
social intercourse, to which we not seldom 
confine the word culture^ remains for many, 
even to the present day, the chief end of edu- 
cation. So the unified mediaeval curriculum, 
consisting of the seven liberal arts, together 
with philosophy and theology, reaching as it 
did from the lowly earth to the vaulted skies, 
is still for many the prototype of all that a 
curriculum should be, — fixed, unified, uni- 
versal; perfect in limb and feature, as inca- 
pable of improvement as the sphere is of being 
more spherical. We admire the culture of 
the Greek and the curriculum of the school- 
man, but we forget that the foundation of the 
one was slavery, and the presupposition of the 
other was the academic seclusion of a small 
body of men. 

The modern world, though cherishing the 
good things in ancient culture, and admir- 
ing the architectural unity of the mediseval 
curriculum of study, has refused to be guided 



50 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

by the ideals of the one, or to be forced into 
the moulds of the other. The reason is not 
far to seek, for it is evident to all observers 
that modern conditions are wholly different 
from those of the ancient or the mediaeval 
world. 

There are three things that make this depar- 
ture from old ideals imperative. They are : — 

1. The extension of knowledge ; 

2. The differentiation of industries; and, 

3. The universalizing of education. 

The eighteenth century gave us physics 
and mathematics, and the nineteenth gave us 
biology, yet up to fifty years ago the higher 
schools taught little besides Latin and Greek 
and elementary mathematics. Since that time 
both the exact and the evolutionary sciences, 
which were developed outside the school, 
have become an essential part of the curric- 
ulum, not only in their pure, but also in 
their applied, forms. The humanities them- 
selves, once the main reliance of the school- 
man, have been greatly enlarged. In the 
times of Erasmus, the vernacular in each of 
the countries of Europe was a tongue for 



INTEREST AND ELECTIVE STUDIES 51 

peasants. Scholars spoke Latin. Erasmus 
himself dwelt successively in Holland, Ger- 
many, France, Italy, Austria, and England; 
yet he could speak neither German nor 
French, Italian nor English, and he apologized 
to a friend in Holland for writing to him in 
Latin, since he wrote his mother tongue so 
ill. To-day, however, all these vernaculars 
have become culture languages, which are 
taught in our schools for their linguistic and 
literary value. History, which was almost 
rudimentary fifty years ago, has become a 
modern science of large and constantly in- 
creasing dimensions, while psychology, ethics, 
sociology, and indeed all aspects of the human 
sciences, have been transformed by the new 
methods of evolution. 

Not only have industries been differentiated, 
but behind each of them lies a body of scientific 
knowledge, which its leaders must master. In 
witness of this fact, one may point to the 
sciences taught in the modern university as a 
preparation for a knowledge of agriculture, a 
subject which the race has always thought it 
understood. 



52 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

Once academic and higher education was a 
professional preparation for a few restricted 
callings, but now it is a preparation for the 
higher stages of all callings. It is the proud 
boast of engineers that they will soon be the 
best educated professional body in existence. 

Not only has higher education expanded to 
meet the needs of mechanical, electrical, chemical, 
and civil engineers, but it also provides instruc- 
tion for those who follow agriculture, horticul- 
ture, forestry, architecture, as well as for any 
department of pure or applied natural or social 
science. " I would found," said Ezra Cornell, 
*'an institution where any person may find 
instruction in any subject." This is the spirit 
of modern education. The humanities are not 
forgotten or restricted ; on the contrary, they 
are vastly extended. The languages are 
increased from two to five or six ; the meagre 
amount of literature that could once be read 
in foreign tongues is reenforced by a world 
literature in English ; the fine arts are taught 
as never before, and are applied to every phase 
of industrial and social life ; history has ex- 
panded into a science so far-reaching that no 



INTEREST AND ELECTIVE STUDIES 53 

one man now pretends to be master of more 
than a fraction of it. The modern university, 
in short, now furnishes knowledge and technical 
skill in practically all the human sciences, the 
natural sciences, and the economic sciences. 

The bodies of knowledge that have caused 
such unexampled university expansion are in 
general now available in the high school. This 
fact makes it possible, and the demands of life 
make it desirable, for the high school to offer 
many more studies than any one student can 
possibly pursue. Thus at least five languages 
may be offered instead of two, the work in 
history and literature may be indefinitely 
extended, while all the sciences, each with 
laboratory practice, may be added, to say noth- 
ing of training in manual and business tech- 
nique. Election on some basis seems inevitable. 
Were we not a democracy, we might ignore 
the claims of all classes, except the few that 
in the past have enjoyed the advantages of 
training and culture. But such a policy is 
now as impossible as it is undesirable. We 
might employ the European expedient, and 
establish schools for the social castes, building 



54 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

classical schools for the sons of patricians, and 
trade and technical schools for the toilers. 
German, French, and English children have 
to elect schools, but, outside our great cities, 
American children cannot do this even if they 
would, for we have but one type of high 
school. Our pupils must elect studies if they 
elect anything. Under such circumstances, 
the attempt to have a uniform fixed curric- 
ulum has manifold and obvious disadvantages. 

Just as a Franklin press is easier to operate 
than a modern Hoe press, but is far less effi- 
cient, so an old-fashioned fixed curriculum 
for secondary schools is simpler to administer, 
but has serious defects. Some of the more 
obvious defects may be mentioned. 

In the first place, such a curriculum denies 
a place to many subjects that have proved 
themselves as valuable as those chosen both 
for the generation of power and for usefulness 
in future callings. To omit such subjects is 
to fail to prepare students in the best way 
for new lines of university work, and for new 
forms of industrial occupation. A fixed cur- 
riculum fails, moreover, to give the student 



INTEREST AND ELECTIVE STUDIES 55 

all the types of mental training to which he 
is entitled. The methods of linguistics and of 
mathematics by no means exhaust the distinc- 
tive forms of training to be had in education. 
To mention a single instance, they fail to give 
any adequate training to the intellectual motor 
powers which are essential to the effective 
education of youth. The experimental sci- 
ences, manual training, and certain parts of 
commercial courses supply this element in 
abundance. 

In the next place, a fixed curriculum leaves 
a large part of the latent ability of the students 
still inert, for no student has his powers ap- 
pealed to on all sides ; moreover, some are 
much more gifted in the things not included 
in the curriculum than they are in those that 
are chosen. Some excel most in languages, 
some in history, some in mathematics, some in 
quantitative others in qualitative or evolu- 
tionary sciences, while still others may be 
strongest in aesthetic studies or in constructive 
exercises. It may almost be said that capac- 
ity to receive polish through so-called culture 
studies is a gift confined to the few. There 



56 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

is plenty of soft wood in the world, which, 
though useful, does not admit of high polish. 
Moreover, when mathematics is associated with 
languages or other discrete subjects, it may 
become a burden even to the able, while to 
the less gifted it is likely to prove a veritable 
desert of abstractions. But the same minds 
that wilt and droop under an infliction of 
isolated mathematics will grow and thrive 
through the association of the study with 
quantitative science or with exercises in the 
construction of things. 

Again, a fixed curriculum lacks, for many 
students, those associations of ideas that are 
capable of rousing the mind to its best efforts. 
We do not sufficiently regard the principle of 
induction in education. When a study can 
be found that appeals powerfully to the stu- 
dent's interest, which arouses his dormant 
powers like a trumpet call, it is nearly always 
possible to secure an induced interest in allied 
subjects that can be shown to be contributory 
to the ends most desired. When students are 
animated by powerful interests, as, for example, 
in professional courses, they submit cheerfully 



INTEREST AND ELECTIVE STUDIES 57 

to large amounts of study ; but when they are 
dealing with systems of ideas to which no vital 
interests are attached, they clamor for variety 
and light work. 

It has long been the dream of the school- 
man that somehow, sometime, an ideal fixed 
curriculum will be devised which may be 
properly imposed upon all youth, and which 
will be equally beneficial and essential in the 
education of all. Like most dreams, this, too, 
is an illusion. The three things that are lead- 
ing us away from, rather than toward, such 
an ideals are, as we have seen, the expansion 
of knowledge, the differentiation of industries, 
and the universalizing of higher education. 
It cannot be regarded as reasonable to select 
a few from a large number of equally good 
studies, and say that these alone shall be 
taught. When dozens of diverse industries 
are clamoring for trained leaders, it cannot 
be regarded as reasonable to say that we will 
bring our educational system into close rela- 
tions with a few only. Finally, when every 
form of talent offers itself for the higher train- 
ing, it cannot be regarded as reasonable to say 



58 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

that we will educate a few types only. All 
studies, all industries, all talents, must be 
taken into consideration. It cannot be said 
that the problems now confronting the school- 
man are simpler than they once were ; they 
are vastly more complicated. At the same 
time, they are more interesting and more 
important. 

At this point I wish to call attention to the 
self-evident proposition that merely naming 
the studies to be taught or showing into what 
groups they naturally fall, is inadequate as an 
answer to the query concerning what branches 
high school students shall study. We must, 
for instance, distinguish between physics and 
chemistry as sciences and these subjects as 
nature work, making clear to ourselves that 
nature work simply explains instances of 
natural laws, whereas science seeks the laws 
underlying instances, or verifies laws by 
means of examples. But even where we con- 
fine ourselves to the scientific aspects of 
physics, chemistry, and biology, there may 
yet be a wide range for the kind, amount, and 
spirit of the instruction. These subjects can 



INTEREST AND ELECTIVE STUDIES 59 

be so taught as to stimulate an unbounded 
curiosity in them, or they may be so presented 
as to dry up the natural springs of interest. 
I have seen the science classes in a college 
double in size and quadruple in interest, 
through the influence of a scientific society 
meeting once a month, and in which pro- 
fessors and students read reports on the latest 
and most striking scientific discoveries and 
events. Our high school pupils come to us 
eager to understand such things as the motor, 
the telephone, wireless telegraphy, X-rays, and 
liquid air. They have a natural interest in 
striking phenomena of every kind. No form 
of literary work in a high school could excel, 
in value and attractiveness, weekly reports 
upon scientific discoveries and inventions. Yet 
some people ridicule these stimuli to scientific 
interest. When, for example, English school- 
masters were testifying before the Royal Com- 
mission upon the difficulties met in scientific 
instruction, one master asserted that he had 
no difficulty in arousing interest in chemistry. 
When asked what chemistry he taught, he 
replied, "The chemistry of explosive sub- 



60 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

stances." All academic England laughed in 
derisive glee. It may be that this man's teach- 
ing of chemistry both began and ended in a 
flash and a bang, in which case it could not 
have amounted to much. But if the flash and 
the bang made his boys think chemistry a great 
study, and thereby introduced them to system- 
atic work, who shall say that the seemingly 
foolish counsel implied in the reply was not 
the greater wisdom? What is true of science 
is true of the other subjects. It is possible to 
teach ancient languages for purposes now 
archaic. Once Latin and Greek were the 
means both for getting and for expressing ideas. 
Nobody now either writes or speaks in Latin. 
Yet in John Sturm's school the pupils in the 
first six years of their course committed to 
memory twenty thousand Latin words, which 
they used as a means of expressing thought. 
We must teach Latin for modern purposes, 
the greatest of which is, as Professor Ben- 
nett tells us, its influence upon the English 
language. To those who believe this, one may 
venture to ask, with Professor Bennett, whether 
the relation of Latin pronunciation to English 



INTEREST AND ELECTIVE STUDIES 61 

etymology is not vastly more important than 
its relation to the pronunciation of other for- 
eign European languages, and if this is true, 
whether we should not incontinently get back 
to the English pronunciation ? 

Holding in mind now the difference between 
education that promotes survival by its vivid- 
ness and that which conduces merely to sub- 
jective illumination ; and remembering that 
every field of knowledge is vastly extended 
and enriched by new methods of approach ; 
that the diversified industries have in their 
higher stages passed from the field of tradi- 
tional procedure to that of scientific direction; 
and, finally, that higher education has become 
the privilege, not alone of a few favored 
castes, but of the leaders of all callings, — let 
us examine the principles that should govern 
in the selection of studies for the individual. 

It may be assumed, first of all, that a 
normal, well-educated man should at least be 
intelligent concerning the conquests of his 
race in all the distinct fields of its endeavor. 
He need not, indeed, be master of Greek, 
Spanish, calculus, ontology, physical chemistry, 



62 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

geology, civil engineering, law, medicine, the- 
ology ; but he should at least know that these 
studies exist, comprehend something of their 
respective functions, and be familiar with some 
of their elements. In other words, the nor- 
mally constituted mind should dwell, for a 
time at least, upon each distinctive depart- 
ment of important human knowledge. What 
are these departments ? They are easily classi- 
fied into groups sufficiently exact for educa- 
tional purposes. 

We have first of all the human sciences, — 
those that pertain to man as man, to his life 
as embodied in institutions. Excluding the 
professional aspects of such studies, this group 
embraces languages, ancient and modern, litera- 
ture, art, and history. 

Next we have the natural sciences, — those 
that pertain to nature as such, — they are 
physics, chemistry, and astronomy, together 
with their basis of pure mathematics ; the bio- 
logical sciences ; and the earth sciences, like 
physical geography and geology. 

Finally we have the economic sciences, — 
those that show the mind of man in intimate 



INTEREST AND ELECTIVE STUDIES 63 

interaction with the forces of nature. These 
sciences embrace economics proper, technology, 
and commercial knowledge and technique. 

We have here from nine to twelve distinct 
departments of knowledge, according to the 
minuteness of our classification. The social 
reason why every student should have some- 
thing of each, is that each represents a distinct 
and important department of human achieve- 
ment. The psychological reason why each 
mind should come in contact with every one 
of these departments, is that each one embodies 
a distinct method, a definite mental movement, 
not found adequately represented in any other 
branch. The method of linguistics, for in- 
stance, is quite distinct from that of mathe- 
matics or art or history. The evolutionary 
sciences are wholly different in method from 
the exact sciences. In the same way commer- 
cial technique differs from that of mechanics. 

Arguing now from these self-evident facts, 
the first principle I propose for the selection 
of a normal boy's course of study is that he 
should take at least something from each chief 
department representing a peculiar method and 



64 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

a specific body of important knowledge. The 
second principle is that the boy, aided by his 
parents and advised by his teacher, should be 
allowed to elect what studies he will take within 
each department. The first principle fixes the 
types the student shall have represented in his 
education; the second allows the individual to 
put the emphasis where he will, to determine 
what department of the university he will 
enter, to select his studies in view of his future 
career. In this way the ideas growing out of 
his school work become, not only clear, but 
vivid. The student ceases to mark time, or 
to try to escape from school; on the contrary, 
he works with accelerating earnestness and 
enthusiasm. 

If provided with equally efficient teachers 
and supplied with equally good equipments, 
the student in the scientific, the technological, 
or the commercial course is not inferior to his 
brother in the arts course in the range of his 
education, in the quality of his discipline, in 
the dignity of his work, or in the worthiness of 
his destination. Difference is not inferiority. 

In determining what studies a student may 



INTEREST AND ELECTIVE STUDIES 65 

be permitted to elect, one must not fail to dis- 
tinguish between interests that are transient 
because of the novelty of the subject or the 
manner of the presentation, and those that are 
vital and relatively permanent because rooted 
in bodies of vivid ideas. Interest often follows 
the teacher. A pleasing personality, a happy 
method of presentation, will frequently secure 
an interest on the part of the student which 
is active as long as it lasts. It is not uncom- 
mon to find teachers who make any subject 
that they teach interesting. Such teachers are 
highly prized, for they bring student and study 
into the happiest contact, thus presenting each 
body of ideas in such a way that it has the 
best possible chance of becoming vivid. In 
many cases, however, the interest awakened is 
due, not to the study itself, but to the one 
who teaches it. In another grade, under an- 
other teacher, it may become tedious, so that, 
unless it is contributory to some other body 
of ideas that is vivid, the study is likely to 
prove unprofitable. But if the student is bent 
upon following some branch of engineering, 
for example, and finds geometry hard, he will 



66 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

not think of flinching from the work of over- 
coming the obstacles that geometry presents ; 
for, as Dr. Dewey would say, the interest in 
the end, the engineering, is transferred to the 
means, the geometry. In other words, the 
geometry borrows its vividness from another 
body of ideas. 

Again, mere novelty of subject often lends 
a fictitious interest. The ardent desire that 
pupils often show for making collections, for 
trying experiments, for dabbling with chemi- 
cals, and for trying new things generally, is 
an evidence of this kind of interest. Such 
excursions into new fields are by no means 
to be deplored, for they may be the chief 
agency in revealing the student to himself, 
of enabling him to discover his aptitudes and 
permanent motives. But the flashes should 
not be mistaken for enduring fires. 

On the other hand, for reasons already given, 
the student should at some point of his late 
grammar, or his secondary period, come into 
contact with each great department of knowl- 
edge, else he is in danger of missing the sub- 
jects that would otherwise prove of the greatest 



INTEREST AND ELECTIVE STUDIES 67 

value and interest to him. In the words of 
the Committee of Ten: "The youth who has 
never studied any but his native language can- 
not know his own capacity for linguistic 
acquisition; and the youth who has never 
made a chemical or physical experiment cannot 
know whether or not he has taste for exact 
science. The wisest teacher or the most 
observant parent can hardly predict with con- 
fidence a boy's gift for a subject which he has 
never touched." There should, therefore, be 
a fair trial of each subject under favorable 
circumstances, before it is dismissed from 
further consideration. It is at this point that 
the teacher, with his wider knowledge of the 
interrelations of subjects, must show the stu- 
dent what instrumental value even a distaste- 
ful study has in the realization of purposes 
already formed. The study of mathematics is 
essential to exact science. The study of lin- 
guistics is necessary for literary efficiency. 

To put the foregoing doctrine into its brief- 
est form, departments of work are prescribed 
in so far as they embody knowledge necessary 
either for earning a livelihood or for making 



b» INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

life worth living ; but the studies within depart- 
ments, so far as they represent anything like 
equality of value, are to be made elective. In 
other words, students elect, not departments, 
but more or less equivalent studies within de- 
partments. The result is that all leading types 
both of knowledge and of training will be rep- 
resented in each student's education, while the 
elasticity allowed gives each the best possible 
chance of discovering his greatest powers, and 
of finding those bodies of ideas which to him 
are most clear and vivid. 

It matters little whether this freedom take 
the form of elective courses as recommended 
by the Committee of Ten, or whether it take 
the form of apparently free election, as at Bos- 
ton, at Ithaca, or at Galesburg. Nor need we 
fear that tradition will not have its due in- 
fluence. It takes a courageous mind to forego 
classics for modern languages if such a course 
is thought to be an evidence of lack of ability 
or of diligence. There is more danger that a 
student will elect the old studies to his injury 
than that he will suffer harm from choosing 
the new. Witness the fact that the propor- 



INTEREST AND ELECTIVE STUDIES 69 

tion of high school students taking Latin has 
doubled during the last ten years. 

Thus far, unless by implication, I have not 
urged the worth of any one department of high 
school work to the disadvantage of any other. 
I may perhaps be allowed, in closing, to state 
my opinion as to the kind of work that would 
do the most in our high schools to stimulate 
vivid ideas, especially in the boys. Our great- 
est lack, particularly in courses in which the 
humanities prevail, is the meagreness of op- 
portunity for vigorous outgoing motor expres- 
sion. This can be found most effectively in 
laboratory practice and in manual training. 
To show where we stand in the amount of the 
latter kind of work as compared with Germany, 
I quote the opinion of Professor Thurston of 
Cornell. To educate our people as well in 
these respects as Germany does, he says we 
should have in this country: — 

1. "Twenty technical universities, having in 
their schools of engineering and higher tech- 
nics 50 instructors and 500 pupils each. 

2. "Fifty trade schools and colleges, of 20 
instructors and 300 students each. 



70 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

3. " Two thousand technical high schools, or 
manual-training schools, of 10 instructors and 
200 pupils each. 

" That is to say, there should be in the United 
States to-day 1000 university professors and 
instructors and 10,000 students under their 
tuition studying the highest branches of tech- 
nical work; there should be 1000 college pro- 
fessors and 15,000 pupils in technical schools 
studying for superior positions in the arts ; and 
20,000 teachers engaged in trade and manual- 
training schools, instructing pupils 400,000 in 
number, proposing to become skilled workmen. 
We have in this country 10,000,000 families, 
among which are at least 1,000,000 boys who 
should be in the latter class of schools." 

Our need of such training from an economic 
point of view does not compare with that of 
the Germans, for while we have unlimited re- 
sources in field and mine, and abundant room 
for internal expansion, they are increasing rap- 
idly in population within an area small in ex- 
tent and but scantily furnished with agricultural 
and mineral resources. Germans must expand 
their foreign market for manufactured goods, 



INTEREST AND ELECTIVE STUDIES 71 

or starve. Our need is more a subjective one. 
We desire to make the most of every life, to 
develop it to the limit of its powers, to enrich 
its production, and to sweeten its existence. 
It is both necessary and desirable that we 
should cherish the noble educational ideals of 
the past, and use to a large extent the means 
of training that numerous generations have 
found good; but it is equally imperative that 
our students should participate freely in the 
knowledge and activities of the present. Under- 
standing is promoted through that clear appre- 
hension of the past achievements of the race 
which contemplation provides, but efficiency 
comes through vivid participation in the activi- 
ties that promote survival ; for, though insight 
comes through revelation, power comes through 
action. 



VI 

EDUCATION, INTEREST, AND SURVIVAL 

Among primitive peoples it is life that edu- 
cates ; among modern cultured races it is the 
book. Primitive education is effective, but 
limited. It transmits but little from the past, 
and promotes but little progress. Modern 
school education stores the mind with much 
inherited lore, but its isolation from the reali- 
ties of life tends to make it ineffective ; it 
promotes survival only indirectly, in that it 
trains the mind and furnishes the tools of 
learning. 

One can count with certainty upon interest 
when life educates, but not so surely when the 
school performs this function. It may be that 
the school will seem so far removed from the 
recognizable agencies of survival that the pupil 
will remain in it no longer than circumstances 
compel him to. The problem of the teacher in 
the modern school is not an easy one, for not 
72 



EDUCATION, INTEREST, AND SURVIVAL 73 

only must he make his instruction really ser- 
viceable to the pupil for his future life, but he 
must bring distant ends so near that they will 
furnish real motives for present endeavor. 
Unless the teacher can do this, the pupil fails 
to experience any abiding enthusiasm for his 
work. To be truly educative, the instruction 
of the school must be able to contribute power- 
fully to the pupil's future welfare ; and it must 
be so imparted that immediate ends shall con- 
tribute to make the distant ones seem real. 

As a matter of fact, most of our education is 
at present so conducted that children take it as 
an enforced prescription, while the life outside 
of the schoolroom furnishes them all their in- 
centives to action. In general we find the 
mass of children early shaking off the effects 
of our subjective training, rapidly forgetting all 
we taught them, except the multiplication table 
and a few other useful tools of knowledge, and, 
inspired by the activity about them, taking 
their place among the classes that survive. It 
is indeed some comfort to the teacher to know 
that, however little he may promote the power 
of survival in a pupil, he cannot wholly spoil a 



74 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

thoroughly active mind, or entirely counteract 
the influence of the outside world of achieve- 
ment. Yet our school education should be of a 
character actively to promote the qualities that 
lead to survival. Our pupils should survive 
somewhat because of our teaching, not entirely 
in spite of it. 

One unfortunate result of insisting that the 
student shall spend years upon a body of knowl- 
edge that to him is devoid of vital motives, is 
that such a policy not only fails to give an ade- 
quate development to the mind, but also leads 
at times to results that Lombroso would call 
forms of degeneration. Among the degenerates 
that such culture helps to produce, four classes 
come readily to mind. 

First, there is the class that may be called the 
intellectual aristocrats. They are the men who 
cherish archaic ideals, especially in education; 
who try to measure the present by the stand- 
ards of an outgrown past. They cherish what 
Professor Baldwin calls autotelic ideals of cul- 
ture, where every study is an end in itself. It 
is art for art's sake. In their view the diagogic 
culture of the Greek should rule in the edu- 



EDUCATION, INTEREST, AND SURVIVAL 75 

cation of the leaders of an industrial civiliza- 
tion. Tliey deny the badge of scholarship to all 
who do not accept their standards. They 
deplore a commercial education as basely utili- 
tarian. An intellectual aristocrat is, as one re- 
cently said in New York, lost in uncertainty, until 
the stranger speaks, as to whether the alleged 
university man to whom he is introduced is " a 
scholar or merely a sublimated type of tinker." 
Intellectual aristocrats resent giving honorary 
degrees to eminent men whose qualifications for 
such a distinction are only oratory and states- 
manship, or eminent achievement in public ser- 
vice. Such men, in so far as their characters 
are consistent, do not truly survive in a modern 
world; for, when tested by the standards of 
survival, we see that they merely exist, since 
they either live upon the accumulations of 
worthier men, or they subsist on the bounty of 
those who find their gibes amusing. 

A second class of degenerates produced by 
too much culture of a wrong kind are those we 
call dudes. They are creatures whose inheri- 
tance of culture has eclipsed their intellects. 

A third class, more respectable, but scarcely 



T6 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

less unfortunate than the first two, are those 
who may be called academic paralytics. They 
are men who make a profession of their own 
education, and who thus gradually bring about 
a paralysis of their executive powers, while 
cramming their heads with ideas more or less 
clear. All too frequently men of this class 
become teachers, thus tending to increase their 
kind by propagating subjective ideals of educa- 
tion. 

A fourth class of culture-degenerates, found 
oftenest in the older parts of our country, and 
produced in part at least by scarcity of vivid 
ideas, are what may be called the digestive 
paralytics. They are men whose systems must 
be nourished by milk and regulated by tablets. 
Not unfrequently this class have abnormally 
developed brains. They are like large engines 
with small boilers. Their feelings are intense, 
but often abnormal ; their formal intellectual 
powers are great, but usually directed to reac- 
tionary, visionary, or subjective ends. They 
neither exert permanent influence, nor beget 
healthy children. 

Yet after all, our country has but few degen- 



EDUCATION, INTEREST, AND SURVIVAL 77 

erates, even if we count in the men of genius, 
all of whom Lombroso regards as degener- 
ates. The chief fault to be found with a cur- 
riculum of the old type, where most of the ideas 
presented are at best but clear to most students, 
is not so much the great harm as the little good 
it does. It usually fails to awaken that form 
of mental enthusiasm which stirs up the active 
energies of the soul, which makes the youth 
laugh at obstacles and rejoice in difficulties 
to be overcome. 

It has been said that the race is not always to 
the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but to 
the active, the vigilant, and the brave. This is 
true also in the struggle for survival. The 
active, the vigilant, and the brave survive ; the 
inactive, the careless, and the cowardly do not. 
Our education, therefore, should be that which 
tends to activity rather than to inactivity. It 
should promote vigilance in observation of the 
things that conduce to survival. It should 
promote, not so much the courage of the battle- 
field, as the courage that gives self-control in 
the use of the wealth an industrial society pro- 
duces. 



78 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

But here we must distinguish between the 
mental activity that promotes survival and that 
which does not. The education of outer in- 
activity is that which ignores the present req- 
uisites for survival and confines itself to inner 
commotion. A tempest in a teapot may be 
terrific, but the world neither knows nor cares 
about it. One may then be actively inactive 
in education ; as, for example, when one teaches 
ancient languages as if they were still the 
means for acquiring and expressing ideas, as 
they once were, but as they no longer are. 
Such teaching furnishes modern men with 
archaic instruments, but these no longer assist 
them to survive. Ideals persist in education 
long after they are obsolete in practice, so that 
forms of education once useful to the race now 
cease to promote activity, and hence have lost 
their power to promote survival. 

Not only may education promote passivity by 
its emphasis upon obsolete ideals, but, as ex- 
plained in the preceding section, by failing to 
distinguish between ideas that are merely clear 
and those that are both clear and vivid. Ideas 
are clear when they reveal mere differences or 



EDUCATION, INTEREST, AND SUllVIVAL 79 

identities in the things considered; they are 
vivid only when they attach themselves to per- 
ceivable requisites for survival. For example, 
the idea of temperance to a workman as a moral 
conception may be clear, but the idea of tem- 
perance as a requisite to employment as a 
skilled laborer may also be vivid. Vivid ideas 
glow with vital interest, because upon them 
turns the ha^Dpiness or destiny of the individ- 
ual. History, mathematics, languages, science, 
may be so taught as to promote mere clearness 
of conception without conducing materially 
and directly to survival, thus shedding light 
without generating heat. They may, on the 
other hand, be so taught as to reenforce the 
other influences of the environment by making 
ideas both clear and vivid. The teacher may 
in vain give the urchin clear ideas about the 
harmfulness of the cigarette; but the single 
vivid idea that to smoke is manly, that smoking 
enhances his importance in the minds of other 
boys, is enough to make him search the gutter 
for opportunity. We must seek to counteract 
bad vivid ideas with those that are good. Chil- 
dren often yield to injurious vivid ideas because 



80 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

of tlieir nearness. The urchin wants to seem 
manly now, so he puffs and struts. If the 
teacher can make him feel that he is sacrificing 
the genuine manliness for the seeming, his affin- 
ity for the stump in the gutter will not be so 
strong. Boys often want to leave school early 
to earn the bright and shining dollar. But if 
they can be led to compare the men of forty 
who went to work without any education with 
those who acquired an education before going 
to work, the delusive vividness of immediate 
earnings may prove less effective. 

All this would hold with the school as it is ; 
but if the school could be so conducted that 
the pupil could feel that he was doing things 
that count mightily for his present and future 
welfare, active life would not, as now, furnish 
a monopoly of the vivid ideas, and hence of the 
abiding interests. It is not enough, therefore, to 
promote clear ideas in our pupils; we must attach 
ideas to the pupils' inherited motor mechanism. 
This is done through the exercise of outgoing 
self-activity. Mere clearness of intellectual 
vision does not make men efBcient. Each group 
of ideas must find its adequate motor expression, 



EDUCATION, INTEREST, AND SURVIVAL 81 

not only with the tongue, but with the whole 
motor mechanism. There must be writing and 
drawing, painting and moulding ; there must be 
construction in material, both for useful and 
artistic purposes; the active or industrial arts 
should precede the fine arts. The latter should 
cease to be ends in themselves, and should be 
embodied in the useful. So long as art is a 
thing apart, the artists living in seclusion and 
their works hanging in museums, so long will 
it fail to promote the activities that lead to 
survival. When art everywhere promotes 
activity, it will promote life by sweetening and 
adorning it, by conducing to its comfort and 
peace. 

It may be pertinent to ask what share the 
community is taking in furthering the educa- 
tion that conduces to survival. Mr. Ward tells 
us that our education is now intrusted to young 
girls and feeble men.i To this we may properly 
demur, for, alas, not all the girls are young, 
neither, we trust, are all the men feeble. Yet 
the fact is undeniable that the more passive 
part of the community does the teaching. Sub- 
1 See "Dynamic Sociology," vol. ii, p. 557. 



82 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

jective ideals thrive when education is left to 
quiet-loving men and non-economic women. 
The modern woman teacher frequently knows 
no work but that of the school, and for lack of 
training and opportunity cannot induce even 
those expressive activities in which her sex 
most excel. 

The education that would promote survival 
must not forget to inculcate the courage that 
leads to self-control. In a primitive economy, 
it is the underfed that fail to survive. In a 
highly developed industrial organization like 
our own, it is the overfed who perish most 
rapidly. When there is not food enough, in 
such countries as India or China, war, famine, 
and disease quickly eliminate the underfed. 
But in a country like our own, where a single 
state, like Illinois, could produce food enough 
for the whole nation, where pestilence can get 
no foothold and where war does not reduce the 
population, it is over-indulgence in food and 
drink that causes decrease in offspring, and 
forces men into lower stations of life, or cuts 
short the number of their days. The best 
preparation the school can furnish is to give 



EDUCATION, INTEREST, AND SURVIVAL 83 

the young clear and vivid ideas concerning the 
forces that promote or hinder survival, to give 
them permanent and strong interests in the 
realities of life, and to provide them with a 
trained efficiency that scorns debasing tempta- 
tions and rejoices at difficulties to be sur- 
mounted. 

From being primitive and agricultural this 
nation has become urban and industrial. Our 
population, once sparse, is now becoming 
dense. This country, formerly capable of 
supporting perhaps half a million savages, 
has now become able to support a hundred 
milUons of civilized men. Another hundred 
years will increase its supporting power by 
another hundred millions. Our youth are no 
longer trained to efficiency by farm and forest, 
but must look to the school for the develop- 
ment of their powers. If our education 
remains in its subjective and introspective 
state ; if it scorns the present requisites for 
survival, while cherishing those of bygone 
ages; if it attains mere clearness of concep- 
tion, but cares nothing for the vividness that 
comes from living interests ; if the community 



84 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

will not pay for virility in its men teachers or 
give proper training to its women teachers ; if 
it will not encourage the modern spirit by fur- 
nishing modern equipments, — then education 
will pursue its ancient course, causing degen- 
eration in some and failing to make positive 
contributions to the survival of many. But 
if community and teaching force alike insist 
that the modern requisites for survival shall 
be recognized in the equipment and the 
teaching of the school, then there is hope 
that education will become a more potent 
factor than it ever has been in enabling this 
nation to become worthy of its unrivalled oppor- 
tunities. Nothing but ourselves can prevent 
our country from becoming the world's centre 
of freedom, well-being, peace, and power; 
none but teachers themselves can prevent the 
school from performing increasingly useful 
work in furthering these ends. 



VII 

INTEREST, MOTOR TRAINING, AND THE 
MODERN CITY CHILD 

A DISTINCTION was made in Section V be- 
tween clear ideas and vivid ideas. Another 
aspect of the same distinction is that between 
sensory ideas and their motor reactions. The 
underlying physiological fact is that we have 
two systems of nerves, one carrying sensory 
impressions from the outside world to the 
surface, or cortex, of the brain, the other 
carrying motor impulses from the cortex to 
the muscles. It is through the sensations 
effected by the sensory system that ideas, 
knowledge, and thought are made possible ; 
it is through the motor system that men can 
do things, can so adjust themselves to their 
surroundings as to survive. Without the 
extensive development of the sensory-intellec- 
tual side of the mind, men would still be 
savage or primitive, for they would not have 
85 



SQ INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

scientific knowledge enough to enable them 
to understand the nature of the forces around 
them. They would still turn everything that 
could harm or help into demons or gods, 
they would dwell in poverty and ignorance, 
with little more than animal satisfactions and 
animal fate. Without the development of the 
intellectual-motor phases of mind, men would 
have been unable to use their knowledge 
effectively in protecting themselves against 
the destructive forces of nature. The thinker 
would perhaps be wearing skin clothing, 
and living in a wigwam or a bamboo hut. 
But when both sides of the mind are highly 
developed, we find science and motor capac- 
ity happily united, so that the thinker may 
dwell in marble halls and be clad in garments 
of beauty and comfort. He may converse with 
his absent friends, for though sundered far by 
land or sea, he may yet speak with them as if 
face to face. 

The great and abiding interests of life 
cluster about those activities that conduce 
to survival, that have most immediate refer- 
ence to vital adjustment to the environment. 



INTEREST AND MOTOR TRAINING 87 

The mass of mankind are not interested in 
knowledge that is unrehited to their chief 
life purposes, however intrinsically beautiful 
or valuable it may be. If knowledge can 
be turned to account, it is worth consider- 
ing ; but if it is remote from the life at 
hand, it will not excite vivid interest, though 
it may arouse curiosity. As it is with 
adults, so it is with children. The things 
that excite abiding mental enthusiasm relate 
to the things that seem to them important. 
They, it is true, are not yet concerned with 
the serious struggle for economic existence, 
but their natures are ever seeking expression 
in various forms of activity. 

It is an almost irresistible tendency of the 
school to lay the chief stress of its efforts 
upon the sensory-intellectual side of the mind, 
using outgoing expression only so far as the 
acquisition of knowledge or the drilling of 
the mind necessitates. A few motor reactions 
are used, such as the use of the organs of speech 
in reciting (except when the teacher does all 
the talking), and that of the hand in writ- 
ing. But ordinarily there is no free creative 



88 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

use of the larger fundamental muscles, or any 
adequate variety in the use of the smaller ac- 
cessory muscles. It is evident, therefore, that 
the greatest sources of interest in the young 
remain almost untouched by the school, since 
the intellectual-motor aspects of the mind are 
practically ignored. This remark is made, not 
as a reproach to teachers, but as the state- 
ment of a fact that needs serious attention in 
the future. The schools are to-day largely the 
result of forces over which the teacher has 
had little control. With the perception of 
new needs, and changing, or at least change- 
able, circumstances, we may hope for a differ- 
ent order of things. 

It is announced that there is no longer a 
frontier of civilization in America. For four 
hundred years there has been one. Not only 
has there been a frontier all this time, but 
nearly the whole of our vast country has 
remained under frontier or pioneer conditions 
up to within the recollection of men now living. 
Everybody lived in the country or under country 
conditions, and participated therefore, more 
or less intimately, in those primary activities 



INTEREST AND MOTOR TRAINING 89 

that relate closely to immediate or prospective 
livelihood. There was a rough but effective 
division of labor between the home and the 
school. The home trained the intellectual- 
motor, and the school the sensory-intellectual, 
jDOwers. But now the city has come, and 
with its coming the old motor training has 
departed, leaving little or nothing of educa- 
tive value in its place for the city child. 

Can education restore to him the intellectual- 
motor training once so effectively furnished by 
the country ? The answer to this question must 
be considered at some length. 

It were long to tell what advantages are 
gained by an urban life. The growth of the 
city is a necessary consequence of the transi- 
tion from an agricultural to an industrial 
civilization. England first began the process, 
and her example has been rapidly followed by 
France, Germany, Austria, Italy, and by our 
own United States. A hundred years ago but 
three per cent of our population lived in cities, 
now at least half of the people east of the 
Alleghanies live under urban conditions. The 
boundaries of the great state of New York 



90 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

have not been shortened, yet the time will 
soon be when seventy-five per cent of her 
population will cease to be rural. A world 
process of such magnitude would have been 
impossible had the advantages of industrial 
development not greatly outweighed those of 
the old system. Almost everything that con- 
tributes most to our personal and national 
advancement is due to this change. Education, 
social intercourse, wealth, high standards of 
life, joined to indefinite expansion in popula- 
tion, industrial supremacy, national unity of 
purpose, — all these belong in greatest measure 
to the industrial urban state. Yet with all 
these unquestioned gains there are large and 
often permanent losses involved in the change 
from rural to urban life. Some of these losses 
are inevitable, some are remediable. The city 
must forego the free uncontaminated air of 
the country ; it must do without the country's 
quiet, its open stretches of field and meadow, 
its tree-lined streams, the low of kine, and 
the song of bird. It is only in our brief 
vacations that we are enabled to enjoy what 
was once our permanent heritage. But there 



INTEREST AND MOTOR TRAINING 91 

are also serious educative losses that have 
arisen in the modern city. These we must 
now consider. 

The programme of elementary education in 
America before the rise of large cities consisted 
of two parts : first, training in muscular power 
and practical efficiency through diversified 
labor; and second, discipline of the mind 
through drill in mastering the elements of knowl- 
edge as represented in reading, writing, arith- 
metic, and grammar. To these we may add 
healthful and almost unrestricted opportunities 
for such play as a strenuous life permitted. 

An urban community is likely to overlook 
the educational value of richly diversified labor. 
Not a little of the versatility, the individual 
initiative, the aggressiveness and general effi- 
ciency of the urban business or professional man 
has been due to the early discipline of farm 
life. 

What can a country boy of fifteen do ? Here 
is what Mr. Elbert Hubbard in his Philistine 
says he himself could do at that age : — 

" When I was fifteen years of age I could 
break wild horses to saddle or harness, and 



92 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

teach kicking cows to stand while they were 
being milked. I could fell trees, and drop the 
tree in any direction desired; I knew the rela- 
tive value of all native woods, appreciated the 
differences in soil, grains, fruits, and simple 
minerals. I could use the draw-shave, adze, axe, 
broadaxe, cross-cut saw, sickle, and cradle. I 
could make a figure-four trap, an axe helve, a 
neck-yoke, ox-yoke, whiffletree, clevis, and could 
braid an eight-strand cattle whip. We used to 
mend our harness on rainy days, and I could 
make a wax-end and thread it with a bristle, 
and use a brad-awl. I knew how to construct 
an ash-leach and to make soft soap, apple butter, 
and pumpkin pies. 1 knew the process of weav- 
ing flax and wool, of making and burning brick. 
I knew on sight, and had names for a score or 
more of birds, and had a good idea of the habits 
of squirrels, skunks, wolves, and the fishes that 
swam in the creeks. I knew how to cure hams, 
shoulders, and sidemeat; to pickle beef, and 
cover apples with straw and earth so that they 
would keep in safety through the most severe 
winter, and open up in the spring fresh and 
valuable. Of course my knowledge was not of 



INTEREST AND MOTOll TRAINING 93 

a scientific order, and I could not have explained 
it to another, because I never knew I had it." 

When to all this we add the training that 
comes from managing farm animals and tools, 
from overcoming extraordinary difficulties in 
field and forest, from dogged persistence in 
work, beginning before the rise and ending only- 
after the setting of the sun, we may appreciate 
to some extent the perfect coordination of 
muscle and mind effected by such labor, and 
understand the fertility of resource and the un- 
tiring persistence in the accomplishment of ends 
that such labor produces. Furthermore, among 
thrifty farmers, where pleasures were simple 
but hearty, where food was good and abundant, 
the nerves of the young were steady, the brain 
was clear, even if not especially active, and the 
digestion was perfect. All life, in short, though 
uneventful, was at least wholesome, and in a 
large measure educative in the highest sense. It 
was only when this training was continued too 
long that it led to arrested development. The 
country boys who make great successes in the 
city leave the farm before physical labor sinks 
into benumbing routine. 



94 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

What educative influences do our children 
lose when we become denizens of a large city ? 
At least three important ones : viz., first, 
early opportunity to work under healthful 
and varying conditions ; second, variety in 
work after the period of elementary educa- 
tion ; and third, opportunity for free, health- 
giving play. 

The children of the poor are not allowed to 
work steadily until they have passed through 
the elementary school, usually not before the 
age of fourteen, while the children of the 
well-to-do never work at all until they have 
finished the high school, and in many cases 
even the college itself. Such children are 
mostly lacking in the deftness of hand and 
the readiness of invention that characterized 
their fathers. Their nerves are often unsteady, 
the coordination of muscle and mind is imper- 
fect, and digestion is defective. Often their 
minds are overstimulated by exciting books or 
theatres or other forms of intensive life. The 
girls early and easily tend toward nervous 
delicacy or disease ; while the boys, especially 
if they fall into vice, become hlase at an early 



INTEREST Am) MOTOR TRAINING 95 

age, and in general fail to manifest the virility 
of their progenitors. 

Even when the period of steady labor ar- 
rives, the city boy lacks the variety that gives 
vitality to the country lad. Routine drives 
out spontaneity and opportunity for individual 
initiative. Industries are now highly differ- 
entiated, so that one workman is usually called 
upon to do but a single kind of work for 
long stretches of time. Compare the man 
who once made a whole watch with the man 
who now tends the machines that turn the 
pivots, or the youth who does a dozen kinds 
of work with a spirited team with the one 
who picks slate on a coal breaker. The men- 
tal life, once stimulated by labor, must in 
the main now find its stimulus outside of 
labor. Certain qualities of endurance and 
persistence will always be cultivated by con- 
tinuous work, but under modern urban con- 
ditions labor lacks much of the old educative 
value. 

A modern high school lad, when told that 
he lacked the discipline that comes from 
diversified work, replied, "What's the odds, 



96 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

SO you are strong?" To a certain extent he 
was right in his reply ; for, being a prominent 
member of a football eleven, and an all-round 
athlete in a boyish way, he had gained a cer- 
tain efficiency not unlike that of the country 
boy of the same age. But city children have 
for the most part lost opportunity to play. 
In the older cities in Germany the children 
have forgotten how, that is, have racially for- 
gotten. Their idea of a recess is a promenade 
over the cobblestones of a schoolyard, while 
munching black bread and Wurst. Our city 
children are fast approaching a like condition. 
The most pitiful sight in the city to one 
accustomed to the open country is the pathetic 
effort of children to play in a narrow, crowded 
street. To play a vigorous game is to risk 
life, to obstruct the walks or break the win- 
dows, while to wrestle on the pavement is 
to break the bones. The thumb in a game 
of marbles is about the only organ that is 
afforded unrestrained exercise. Were it not 
for the annual summer excursions to country, 
mountain, and seashore, made by wealthy fami- 
lies, the city boy would be in danger of find- 



INTEREST AND MOTOR TRAINING 97 

ing many of his important organs almost as 
useless as the vermiform appendix. 

Can education in whole or in part make up 
to the child for that loss of wholesome educa- 
tional influences that ensued when his grand- 
parents or his parents became residents of a 
city? First of all, we need to examine the 
adequacy of city schools as at present consti- 
tuted to this end. 

The modern city child has much more time 
for school than his predecessor in rural life 
had. Formerly a boy attended school three 
or four months of the year, and was employed 
mostly in out-of-door labor the remainder of 
the time. The city boy is in school from nine 
to ten months each year. The country lad 
had many chores to do night and morning, 
even when he went to school; but the city 
boy, having no physical work to do, is sent 
home with a lot of school tasks, which abridge 
his daylight recreation and infringe on his 
hours for indoor amusement or sleep. 

Again, when life was furnishing the major 
part of education in healthful, mind-stimulating 
labor, the school perhaps did well to confine 



98 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

its brief labors to routine work in mastering 
the elementary tools of knowledge. Then 
children learned to read, but they seldom read 
anything; they learned to write and spell and 
parse ; but they made little or no use of these 
accomplishments, except in the rare cases when 
the lad went to college. It might be sup- 
posed that now, when the school commands, 
not a bare fraction, but practically the whole 
of the time of the children for years, it would 
do much more than enable them to acquire 
the tools of knowledge. To a certain extent 
it does, for children now read during a por- 
tion of the time they formerly used to work 
or play. They get a smattering, too, of his- 
tory and geography, and sometimes they learn 
to love nature. But, on the whole, if we ask 
what the school is doing for the urban child 
under modern conditions, we must answer that, 
for the most part, it is merely doing more of 
what it used to do when life itself was the 
larger part of education. 

A few facts will help to explain why the 
school has remained practically unchanged, 
though outside influences have been totally 



INTEREST AND MOTOR TRAINING 99 

altered. In the first place, we have thought 
ourselves unable to pay the salaries necessary 
to secure even a reasonable number of strong 
men, and have in consequence employed almost 
exclusively women, whose services may be had 
for little money. Outside the larger cities, no 
men teach in elementary schools, while even 
in high schools the number of men teachers 
is constantly decreasing. In New York State 
only about one-third of the high school teachers 
are men. The money prizes are too small to 
induce men to abandon those callings and pro- 
fessions that fascinate the strong man, giving 
him a field for the exercise of his limitless 
energy and ambition. Not until the oj)por- 
tunity for men of enterprise in other fields 
becomes much less than it is, shall we find 
American men devoting themselves to educa- 
tion at the pittance paid to German men 
teachers, or now paid to our women teachers. 
But the modern woman teacher is far less 
efficient than she might be, for she has rarely 
been taught to work. All her time from child- 
hood onward has been spent in the absorption 
of knowledge. There has been no time for 

l.ctC. 



100 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

the acquisition of efficiency and skill in labor. 
How many teachers in city schools have been 
trained to be expert in any domestic or fine 
art, such as cooking, millinery, embroidery, 
dressmaking, painting, designing and decorat- 
ing, wood carving, modelling, or even music ? 
Some have indeed acquired more or less skill 
in one or more of these arts, but they do not 
owe it to their school education. This criti- 
cism is not a reproach to the teacher, but only 
to the system that consumes all her energy in 
absorbing facts to pour out in examinations. 
Living under a system that insists on knowing 
everything, but in doing nothing, our women 
teachers have small chance to contribute to 
that phase of mental training that secures 
adequate motor expression for ideas, and thus 
appeals to the most fundamental and abiding 
sources of interest. 

Again, not only do we employ women alone 
as elementary teachers, but we hire so few of 
them that only those forms of education that 
can be made successful by mass teaching have 
any considerable chance of being made really 
effective. But it is precisely the old drill 



INTEREST AND MOTOR TRAINING 101 

in reading, spelling, writing, arithmetic, and 
grammar that yields the best results in mass 
work. The subjects call for much memoriz- 
ing, but demand little individual thinking. 
One teacher can keep many pupils busy in 
spelling and writing words, in solving prob- 
lems and diagramming sentences; but where 
classes number from thirty-five to sixty, as 
they do, a study that demands individual 
thought and guidance in the case of each 
pupil has small chance of being successfully 
taught. 

Not only are teachers so few that teaching 
must be restricted mostly to mass drill, but 
each teacher is assigned to a limited drill area, 
called a grade. This custom, though having 
its advantages, tends still further to mechanize 
the instruction, to narrow the teacher's view, 
to dry up her larger sympathies, to starve 
out the enthusiasms with which she started. 
Superintendent Greenwood gives the grade 
teacher only from three to five years, before 
the mind begins to settle and harden into 
grooves, and the activities to fall into routine. 
The minds of such cease to grow. They 



102 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

become like cisterns which have periodically 
to be refilled at summer schools or by a term 
of graduate work. Minds of this type, to 
change the figure, come to the university as 
to an educational repair shop. 

From the foregoing considerations it is very 
evident that education as now conducted does 
not restore what urban life has lost in edu- 
cational influence. The city boy or girl is 
probably as well educated as present condi- 
tions will allow, but city conditions should 
change as much in the educational field as 
they have changed in that of business. Any 
city that is rich enough to build palaces for 
dwelling and business purposes, to afford pave- 
ments and streets that neither frost nor heat, 
rain nor traffic, can destroy, to make midnight 
seem as midday, is able to raise its expendi- 
tures for education to a point where it is 
possible to give the children a training that 
will enable body and brain to withstand the 
abnormal strains of city life, and to keep alive 
those traits of character that have made our 
nation in the past strong to endure and to 
achieve. 



INTEREST AND MOTOR TRAINING 103 

The most urgent need of the city child is 
physical educative work and spontaneous play. 
It would be difficult to say which is the more 
important. The English know how to turn 
out an efficient man by combining fifteenth 
century instruction with modern play. The 
instruction of the boys of the upper classes in 
that country has long been of that curious 
type. Their minds are drilled in the classics 
by methods and for reasons which were indeed 
valid when these languages were the means 
for getting and for expressing ideas ; but now 
that Latin is no longer studied for such pur- 
poses, the old reasons for its study and the 
old methods for teaching it are obsolete. 
Nothing is more antique than the instruction 
of English boys in the so-called public scliools. 
Their play, however, makes men of them, Mr. 
Kipling to the contrary notwithstanding.^ It 
gives them efficiency to fight their country's 
battles, to spread her commerce over the whole 
earth, to rule inferior people to their own 
good, to found and develop new nations. Let 
us read a few pages of " Tom Brown's School 
1 See his poem, " The Islanders." 



104 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

Days," to show the possibilities of a game with 
more than a hundred on a side : — 

"But now Griffith's baskets are empty, the 
ball is placed again midway, and the school 
are going to kick off. Their leaders have 
sent their lumber into goal, and rated the rest 
soundly, and one hundred and twenty picked 
players-up are there, bent on retrieving the 
game. They are to keep the ball in front of 
the Schoolhouse goal, and then to drive it in 
by sheer strength and weight. They mean 
heavy play and no mistake, and so old Brooke 
sees ; and places Crab Jones in quarters just 
before the goal, with four or five picked 
players, who are to keep the ball away to the 
sides, where a try at goal, if obtained, will be 
less dangerous than in front. He, himself, and 
Warner and Hedge, who have saved them- 
selves till now, will lead the charges. ' Are 
you ready?' 'Yes.' And away comes the 
ball, kicked high in the air, to give the school 
time to rush on and catch it as it falls. And 
here they are amongst us. Meet them like 
Englishmen, you schoolboys, and charge them 
home. Now is the time to show what real 



INTEREST AND MOTOR TRAINING 105 

metal is in you — and there shall be a warm 
seat by the hall fire, and honor and lots of 
bottled beer to-night, for him who does his 
duty in the next half-hour. And they are 
well met. Again and again the cloud of their 
players-up gathers before our goal, and comes 
threatening on, and Warner and Hedge, with 
young Brooke and the relics of the Bull-dogs, 
break through and carry the ball back ; and 
old Brooke ranges the field like Job's war- 
horse, the thickest scrummage parts asunder 
before his rush, like the waves before the 
clipper's bows ; his cheery voice rings over the 
field, and his eye is everywhere. And if these 
miss the ball, and it rolls dangerously in front 
of our goal, Crab Jones and his men have 
seized it and sent it towards the sides with the 
unerring drop-kick. This is worth living for; 
the whole sum of schoolboy existence gathered 
up into one straining, struggling half-hour, a 
half-hour worth a year of common life. 

" The quarter to five has struck, and the play 
slackens for a minute before goal ; but there is 
Crew the artful dodger, driving the ball in 
behind our goal, on the island side, where our 



106 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

quarters are weakest. Is there no one to meet 
him? Yes ! look at little East ! the ball is just 
at equal distance between the two, and they 
rush, together, the young man of seventeen and 
the boy of twelve, and kick it at the same mo- 
ment. Crew passes on without a stagger ; East 
is hurled forward by the shock, and plunges on 
his shoulders, as if he would bury himself in the 
ground ; but the ball rises straight into the air, 
and falls behind Crew's back, while the " bravos " 
of the Schoolhouse attest the pluckiest charge of 
all that hard-fought day. Warner picks East 
up, lame and half stunned, and he hobbles into 
goal conscious of having played the man. 

" And now the last minutes are come, and 
the school gather for their last rush, every boy 
of the hundred and twenty who has a run left 
in him. Reckless of the defence of their own 
goal, on they come across the level big-side 
ground, the ball well down amongst them, 
straight for our goal, like the column of the 
Old Guard up the slope of Waterloo. All 
former charges have been child's play to this. 
Warner and Hedge have met them, but still on 
they come. The Bull-dogs rush in for the last 



INTEREST ATSTD MOTOR TRAINING 107 

time; they are hurled over or carried back, 
striving hand, foot, and eyelids. Old Brooke 
comes sweeping round the skirts of the play, 
and turning short round, picks out the very 
heart of the scrummage, and plunges in. It 
wavers for a moment — he has the ball ! No, 
it has passed him, and his voice rings out clear 
over the advancing tide, ' Look out in goal ! ' 
Crab Jones catches it for a moment ; but before 
he can kick, the rush is upon him and passes over 
him; and he picks himself up behind them with 
his straw in his mouth, a little dirtier, but as cool 
as ever. 

" The ball rolls slowly in behind the School- 
house goal and not three yards in front of a 
dozen of the biggest School players-up. 

" There stands the Schoolhouse prseposter, 
safest of goal keepers, and Tom Brown by his 
side, who has learned his trade by this time. 
Now is your time, Tom. The blood of all the 
Browns is up, and the two rush in together, 
and throw themselves on the ball, under the 
very feet of the advancing column ; the prae- 
poster on his hands and knees, arching his back, 
and Tom all along on his face. Over them 



108 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

topple the leaders of the rush, shooting over 
the back of the prseposter, but falling flat on 
Tom, and knocking all the wind out of his small 
carcass. ' Our ball,' says the prseposter, rising 
with his prize ; 'but get up there, there's a 
little fellow under you.' They are hauled and 
roll off him, and Tom is discovered, a motion- 
less body. 

" Old Brooke picks him up. ' Stand back, give 
him air,' he says ; and then, feeling his limbs, 
adds, 'No bones broken. How do you feel, 
young 'un?' ' Hah-hah,' gasps Tom, as his 
wind comes back, ' pretty well, thank you — all 
right.' 

'"Who is he?' says Brooke. 'Oh, it's 
Brown ; he's a new boy ; I know him,' says 
East, coming up. 

" ' Well, he is a plucky youngster, and will 
make a player,' says Brooke. 

" And five o'clock strikes. ' No side,' is 
called, and the first day of the Schoolhouse 
match is over." 

This is the training that makes Englishmen. 
They might study Choctaw or Chinese and the 
mathematics of Ahmes, yet with such play they 



INTEREST AND MOTOR TRAINING 109 

would grow up to be men. Our high and 
grammar school athletics should abandon, or at 
least subordinate, the college type of play, 
which admits of but small teams of picked 
players, and adopt or adapt those English types 
that give every boy a chance. What has proved 
so life-giving for character and efficiency among 
an English class whose luxuries would naturally 
tend toward their degeneration, teaches a lesson 
to modern urban communities, where almost 
every influence tends toward decline in health 
and motor efficiency. 

It is, however, to the element of physical 
educative work that we must give our chief 
attention. The ideal city education will main- 
tain a just balance between intellectual and 
practical, or motor, phases of life. At present 
it is all intellectual, or sensory, not at all motor, 
or practical. It was the farm that formerly 
supplied the motor training ; now, when there 
is tenfold need of such training, it is forgotten. 
The first requisite for such a new education as 
will conserve old powers is that there be teachers 
enough for the individual to be taught in a group 
small enough to secure his best development of 



110 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

mind iind body. No teacher should have more 
than twent}^ pupils. This will, indeed, double 
the number of teachers, but it will at the same 
time secure for each child the indispensable 
requisites for his survival and his highest 
efficiency in life. 

The second essential requisite of such educa- 
tion is that the proper appliances for motor and 
intellectual training be provided in abundance. 
This will mean somewhat more room and more 
apparatus of an inexpensive sort. 

The school cannot, it is true, furnish the 
experience of farm or factory, but it can do 
better than either, for it can grade its motor 
exercises to their highest educative value. The 
milking of cows may be educative for a few 
months, or until all its phases are mastered ; but 
it can hardly be more educative when continued 
through life. So of every phase of industrial 
occupation. It soon passes its limit of useful- 
ness, soon comes to a point where it ceases to 
be education and becomes drudgery. 

The school, happily, has control of experi- 
ence, which it can press to its highest point 
of usefulness, but never suffer to lead to 



INTEREST AND MOTOR TRAINING 111 

arrested development. It can introduce even 
at the earliest moment motor exercises that 
have all the stimulating power of real situa- 
tions in life, for they, too, are real. In the 
kindergarten grades of Dr. Dewey's school in 
Chicago, for instance, children three or four 
years of age have lessons in cooking, and 
actually cook food that they and their friends 
eat as a part of their daily subsistence. Be- 
mnninor at this tender as^e, the children, in 
groups of ten or a dozen, are led year after 
year through well-graded exercises in cooking 
and sewing for the girls, shop work for the 
boys, and textile and other industries for 
both, all of which are intimately related in 
the minds of the children to the past and 
present of these activities in the community, 
and all likewise serving as means for the mas- 
tery of number and language. 

The years from nine or ten to fourteen or fif- 
teen are the most important for motor training. 
President G. Stanley Hall says ^ of this period : — 

" The hand is in a sense never so near the 

1 "The Ideal School as based on Child Study," Proceed- 
ings of the National Educational Association, 1901, p. 481. 



112 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

brain as now; knowledge never so strongly 
tends to become practical; muscular develop- 
ment never so conditions mental. Muscle 
training of every kind, from play up to 
manual work, must now begin. Instead of 
having the Swedish or other curriculized and 
exactly finished objects made, we should have 
a curriculum of toys at first and of rude 
scientific apparatus later, where everything 
will focus more upon the ulterior use of the 
object than upon the process of making it. 
All these things will be chosen from the 
field of the child's interests." 

If the training is to be more than a senti- 
ment, it must come every day, and must be 
closely articulated with the other work. Its 
spirit must permeate all the work of the 
school. No study must leave the child in a 
state of passive receptivity. 

Outside of mere memoriter drill, one may 
fairly say that intellectual absorption is the 
chief thing now expected of the modern urban 
child. His attitude is that of a listener ; he 
is a being to receive impressions. He must 
store his mind with facts deemed important 



INTEREST AND MOTOR TRAINING 113 

by his teachers. This practice has its genesis 
in the formal instruction of primitive times, 
but it is fixed upon the modern urban school 
by the conditions above described. Professor 
James of Harvard very truly tells us that 
education should not presuppose mere passiv- 
ity on the part of the child ; that there should 
be no impression without corresponding expres- 
sion. That is, education must be motor and 
active as well as sensory and passive. Some 
interpret this saying as meaning that the child 
should talk more ; in other words, that the 
tongue should be the chief motor organ ex- 
ercised. Few will, indeed, depreciate the 
educative value of language ; but when we 
come to a city child, who is subjected to in- 
fluences tending to weaken his whole nervous 
system and to atrophy many of his most im- 
portant physical powers, we may safely put a 
broader interpretation upon Professor James's 
dictum. The whole being, both mental and 
muscular, should be actively enlisted in the 
child's education. The school period should 
be regarded quite as much a part of life as 
a preparation for life subsequent to that period. 



114 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

Each new day should set its new problems, 
which in turn should incite thinking to solve 
them. 

Thinking in vacuo is hard work; thinking 
in the concrete is a delight. In real life there 
is always a motive, an end to be reached, a 
problem to be solved. Thought is generated 
and applied in one act. In ordinary so-called 
school thinking, however, we cause years to 
intervene between the genesis of the thought 
and its application. We have the storage 
battery idea, whereby the youth stores up in 
school mental power to use in manhood. Such 
figures are delusive. The mind of youth 
refuses to be a storage battery for manhood. It 
is rather an organism that, like a tree, con- 
tinues to grow, each year being one of real 
life as well as one of preparation for future 
life. The school in the future will not con- 
tent itself with a formal drill in the tools of 
knowledge, but will add thereto a real knowl- 
edge of nature and of man, while the drill 
will emerge as a requisite for the mastery of 
the real. The school of the future urban 
community will not content itself with pour- 



II^I^llEST AND MOTOR TRAINING 115 

ing knowledge into the pupil as a passive 
recipient, J)ut ^t^will arouse all his native 
energy by ^ff ej^i^g liim a complete and blended 
expressioi^f his Active intellectual and motor 
powers through T* long series of occupations. 
These occupatioii^ will embrace extended ex- 
ercises in all aspects of manual training, cook- 
ing, sewing, textile industry, drawing, music, 
and, later, laboratory practice in the sciences. 
They will furnish a complete co-ordination of 
motor and sensory powers, and, coupled with 
well-blended, concrete, and formal intellectual 
knowledge, will send the child forth from the 
school as from one phase of life to another, 
healthy and vigorous in body, clear in thought, 
and ready in execution. Then the whole boy 
will be educated, and not, as now, but half of 
him. Then the denizen of the city may enjoy 
all its manifold advantages, with the assurance 
that neither he nor his descendants will be 
sacrificing the best half of the heritage that 
came from a rural ancestry. 



VIII 

RELATION OF INTEREST TO METHODS OF 
TEACHING 

It would be a misfortune should teachers 
become possessed of the notion that vivid ideas 
pertain alone to the occupations whereby we 
earn our living. During the elementary period 
the question of vocation is so remote as to bear 
but small relation either to the methods or the 
matter of teaching. To press it unduly to the 
front at this time would be little short of an im- 
pertinence. Even in the high school it is com- 
paratively rare for a student to know definitely 
just what calling will furnish him a livelihood. 
It is evident, therefore, that we cannot rely 
largely on future occupation to furnish us the 
chief means for arousing interest in study. The 
vagueness of remote ends, even those that seem 
closest to requisites for survival, gives them an 
air of unreality that is far from real vividness. 
Ideals and distant ends are goals to be kept in 
116 



METHODS OF TEACHING 117 

mind by the teacher, who knows to what end 
the seed germinates and the bud swells. The 
pupil is absorbed in the present. His impulses 
cause the spontaneity of his conduct, his sur- 
roundings furnish the stimulus to his activity. 
When Jean Valjean gave the doll to Fantine's 
child, famished alike for food and affection, and 
bade her play, he may have seen the future 
mother lavishing upon her offspring the loving 
care denied to herself ; but the child saw only 
the ravishing doll, with its miniature glories of 
form and dress. She gave full play to her long- 
repressed impulses. Her ideas had such inten- 
sity that they completely absorbed her being, yet 
they had nothing to do with adult vocation. 
The soul lives as well as the body, and it is 
about the soul's impulses that the interests of 
childhood cluster. 

When an adult traces out the evolution of his 
great life-purpose, he finds that his ideal has 
undergone many transformations in its develop- 
ment. It is only gradually, and in the fulness 
of time, that original impulses, modified by ex- 
ternal circumstances and by acquired insight, 
assume their permanent form. Final occupation 



118 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

is perhaps more often the result of favoring or 
hindering circumstances than it is of conscious, 
long-cherished design. 

It is because of these facts that Herbart and 
others are justified in regarding the education 
of the pupil as a gradual self-revelation, by 
means of a progressive revelation to him of the 
world of society and the world of nature. 
Gaining a gradual insight into the world with- 
out, he comes to have an insight into the world 
within — his own mind, its powers and aspira- 
tions. But a panorama of the world, whether 
institutional or natural, passed before and into the 
mind of the child, is not the whole of education. 
It is only half of it. Revelation alone may do 
for the Hindoo seer, but not for the children of 
the West. They must have action. A German 
once said, " Mann ist was er isst," ^ but we might 
better say, "Man is what he does." A good 
motto for education would be — Insight through 
revelation ; power through action. 

Giving up then, once for all, the notion that 
in the early stages of education we must appeal 
to adult life to find motives for action and direct 
1 Man is what he eats. 



METHODS OF TEACHING 119 

stimuli to interest, let us turn to the resources 
plainly at our command for securing clearness 
and vividness of ideas in the minds of children. 
Enumerating some of the functions of instruc- 
tion that pave the way to those immediate inter- 
ests which become gradually transformed into 
permanent ones, we find the following points of 
importance : — 

1. We must raise up and vivify immediate 
ends, partly through the presentation of near- 
lying and appropriate ideas, and partly through 
the utilization of native tendencies of thought 
and action. 

2. We must, by the charm of our manner, the 
alertness of our minds, and the skill of our pres- 
entation, aid the pupil to acquire knowledge 
and to develop intellectual and muscular dexter- 
ity. These points will be elaborated in sections 
which follow. 

3. We must seek to vivify masses of ideas by 
making a progressive revelation of their signifi- 
cance to the pupil. The student, for example, 
who has followed the growth of freedom, as 
shown in the successive histories of races and 
nations, will have a conception of liberty and 



120 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

country that will make them seem his most 
precious possessions — the objects of his undying 
devotion. 

4. We must arouse interest in subjects now 
uninteresting, not alone through charm and 
skill, but also by showing how these subjects 
contribute to ends in which interest is already 
aroused. This is interest by induction; it is 
more potent in higher than in lower grades. It 
should be possible to arouse the interest of a 
high school student in any subject that is plainly 
contributory to the purposes he has already 
formed. Though such an induced interest might 
be called indirect, yet there is good prospect 
that it will become direct and independent, pro- 
vided the subject is well taught. 

5. It is one of the chief functions of instruc- 
tion to arouse the native powers of the mind to 
their fullest and freest expression. The power 
of vigorous, rapid, and sustained thought is one 
of the choice fruits of education. It is only 
attained by constant and long-continued effort 
on the part of the child. This end is not to be 
attained through compulsion, but is attained 
rather through that joy in work which the pupil 



1 



METHODS OF TEACHING 121 

experiences when skill and charm of teaching 
incite to noble effort. 

6. The teacher who would help to build up a 
permanent group of life interests in the pujDils 
must recognize to the full extent the native 
curiosity of the mind. The desire to know is as 
spontaneous in a child as the desire to eat. New 
powers are always dawning, so that new stimuli 
to curiosity are always possible. Impulses 
renew themselves in manifold directions. Now 
we perceive the impulse to imitate sounds, now 
to scribble, to draw, to spell, to count, to collect, 
to mimic the actions of others, and always we 
may count upon the impulse to do, to make, and 
even to unmake, or destroy. These impulses 
we must interpret according to their ultimate 
meaning. We must see to what they may or can 
lead ; then we shall know whether to encourage 
or to repress. Every fledgling reaches a period 
in its development when it wants to fly. For- 
tunately there is little to hinder its trying when 
the proper time arrives ; but with the child, 
though every stage in his development wit- 
nesses the birth of new powers and new long- 
ings, the conditions under which we work in the 



122 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

schoolroom often lead us to forbid his flying, 
when that is the next thing he ought to do. 
They may even cause us to lose sight of the fact 
that he has wings. 

Though its stimulus constantly varies, curi- 
osity, or the desire to understand that which 
at once attracts and eludes, is a common heri- 
tage of the race. Curiosity is so fundamental 
that even the animals share it with us. Mr. 
William J. Long tells an entertaining story 
of an old caribou that greatly wanted to 
know the meaning of what he saw and heard. ^ 
The incident was as follows: "I remember 
a solitary old bull that lived on the moun- 
tain side opposite my camp, one summer — a 
most interesting mixture of fear and boldness, 
of reserve and intense curiosity. After I had 
followed him a few times and he found that my 
purpose was wholly peaceable, he took to hunting 
me in the same way, just to find out who I was, 
and what queer thing I was doing. Sometimes 
I would see him at sunset, on a dizzy cliff across 
the lake, watching for the curl of smoke or the 

1" Beasts of the Eield," pp. 60-61, Ginn & Co., Boston, 
New York, Chicago. 



METHODS OF TEACHING 123 

coming of a canoe. And when I jumped in for 
a swim and went splashing dog-paddle away 
about the island where my tent was, he would 
walk about in the greatest excitement, and start 
a dozen times to come down ; but always he 
ran back for another look, as if fascinated. 
Again he would come down on a burned point 
near the deep hole where I was fishing, and, 
hiding his body in the underbrush, would push 
his horns up into the bare branches of a with- 
ered shrub, so as to make them inconspicuous, 
and stand watching me. As long as he was 
quiet it was impossible to see him there ; but I 
could always make him start nervously by flash- 
ing a looking-glass, or flopping a fish in the 
water, or whistling a jolly Irish jig. And when 
I tied a bright tomato can to a string and set it 
whirling round my head, or set my handkerchief 
for a flag on the end of my trout rod, then he 
could not stand it another minute, but came 
running down to the shore, to stamp and fidget 
and stare nervously, and scare himself with 
twenty alarms, while trying to make up his mind 
to swim out and satisfy his burning desire to 
know all about it." 



124 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

An impulse so powerful with both child and 
animal should be utilized to its fullest extent in 
the schoolroom.' It is not a little pathetic to 
see how very small an amount of aroused and 
satisfied curiosity will suffice to make school 
seem an attractive place to the child and to 
sweeten a world of tedious toil. It is more 
pathetic still to find this morsel sometimes 
denied. If even a portion of the time spent by 
teachers in looking over numberless "tests" 
and " compositions " and '' examination papers " 
were used in devising novel methods of presen- 
tation, or in discovering curious facts or expla- 
nations to bring forward during recitation, the 
school would be greatly the gainer. Children 
who would otherwise sink into irretrievable 
dulness, or be bored to the point of torpidity, 
would awake to find themselves in a new and 
wonderful world.^ 

7. Not only must we interpret and utilize 
the native impulses clustering about the desire 
to explore the curious, but we must gratify the 

1 The story, "Jean Mitchell's School," Public School Pub- 
lishing Co., Bloomington, Illinois, furnishes many happy 
illustrations of fertility of device in interesting children. 



METHODS OF TEACHING 125 

equally native impulse to comprehend the causal 
relations of things. Herbart expressed this 
idea when he said that the speculative or causal 
interest is a type fundamental to the mind. 
A mind unbenumbed by exclusive memoriter 
training always responds to the question, Why ? 
Why does the water rise in a pump when we 
lower the handle ? Why does mercury fall in 
the thermometer as the weather grows colder? 
Why does the dew gather on the grass at 
night? Why are railroads and rivers so im- 
portant in military movements even when the 
men must march? Why does dividing the de- 
nominator of a fraction multiply its value ? 
We could well-nigh secure an adequate interest 
in any study by arousing and satisfying the 
scientific curiosity that is possible in connection 
with it. A study not calling for causal or 
rational explanations is hardly worthy of a 
place in the modern school. (Shall we except 
English spelling ?) The important studies give 
abundant opportunity of gratifying the natural 
desire to know the cause of things. This topic 
is treated at more length in Section XV. 
8. This enumeration may fitly close with a 



126 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

reference to the aesthetic impulses found to 
greater or less extent in every individual. 
There is no child that does not hold some 
things to be beautiful. Men are not agreed as 
to the genesis of the art impulse. Some find 
it in play, some in religious feeling, some in 
the economic utilization of articles of utility, 
and some in still other sources ; but, whatever 
its origin, the art impulse is always present 
in some degree with children, and it may be 
aroused and gratified as one of the primary 
instincts of the mind. The school may be made 
a joyous place by the outward adornment of the 
walls, and by the inner adornment of the 
recitation through felicity of language, through 
happy humor, and through the revelation of 
inherent beauties of thoughts and things. 

It will be the purpose of a number of the 
succeeding sections to show more in detail 
how charm of manner and skill of presentation 
may contribute to the formation of the choicest 
interests that may attach themselves to the 
studies whereby we educate. 



IX 

RELATION OF THE TEACHER TO HIS 
METHODS 

Method is not an overlord, dominating all 
the doings of the teacher; it is rather a guiding 
friend, pointing out the shortest path to a de- 
sired goal. Some try to compile books of 
methods as cooks compile cook-books, or as 
doctors classify specifics. A New York physi- 
cian says he would pay ten dollars a dozen for 
a certain fever tablet, if they could not be ob- 
tained for less, since, no matter what the cause 
of the fever, he finds that this particular tablet 
will control it. But the healthy mind should 
not be treated by pathological methods. It 
demands only a reasonable conformity to the 
laws of its normal action, and the presentation 
of matter in a fresh and interesting manner. 

There are indeed a few general principles 
of teaching applicable, with suitable modifica- 
tions, to all subjects and to all ages, but there 
127 



128 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

is no universal method for any subject. There 
are many possible ways to stimulate and guide 
the mind. Many questions must be asked 
and answered before one can determine, even 
approximately, the best procedure in any given 
case. Thus, for example, one must ask: (1) 
What knowledge may I assume that my pupils 
possess concerning this subject? (2) What 
shall be the starting point? (3) What diffi- 
culties of comprehension are likely to be en- 
countered? (4) How can the new matter be 
most easily understood and grasped? (5) In 
what order shall I present this lesson ? What 
shall come first, what last? (6) What can 
I abstract from other subjects that will aid 
in this? (7) How can I make the subject 
vivid? (8) How, in short, can I bring the 
pupils to easy and complete mastery of the 
subject? (9) How can I lead them to make 
the best use of what they learn? 

Every one of the foregoing questions is 
susceptible of a variety of answers, yet the 
answer that is made consciously or implicitly 
helps to determine the way in which the les- 
son shall be taught. No theory can give a 



THE TEACHER AND HIS METHODS 129 

complete and ready answer to every question. 
If it could, teaching would cease to have the 
possibilities of an art within itself, and would 
become a sorry routine occupation. Each case 
must be worked out by itself in the attempt 
to reach a preconceived aim. All ' best ' 
methods, if invariably employed, become in 
virtue of this fact the ' worst ' methods. 
This is true, because, just as nature is said to 
abhor a vacuum, so art abhors a routine. 

Young teachers need to cultivate a sense of 
proportion, to adapt means to given ends. It 
is unwise to try to drive tacks with sledge- 
hammers, or spikes with tack-hammers. Above 
all, the young teacher should refrain from 
exhibiting the whole methodological repertoire 
in each recitation, even if critical observers 
should be present. The ends that need to 
be emphasized in recitation constantly vary. 
Sometimes the exposition of a difficult point 
is the only thing that should be attempted; 
at other times drill upon matter understood, 
but imperfectly learned, should be the cen- 
tral aim of the lesson ; occasionally tests of 
principles will come to the front. Noth- 



130 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

ing at times could therefore be more fatal 
to success than the effort to go through 
a set of prescribed exercises, however excel- 
lent such a plan might be under some circum- 
stances. Furthermore, power does not lie in 
the raw material, but in its use. A good 
teacher can make the dryest sort of material 
glow with life and interest. Most persons 
dislike technical grammar; yet a good teacher 
can make it a charming subject to almost any 
pupil. Once a group of college seniors asked 
to be excused from history, because they said 
they hated the subject. They actually thought 
they disliked history, so great was their loy- 
alty to the teacher, of whom they were 
personally fond. What was really the case 
was that the glorious attractions of this most 
fascinating study were tarnished by unsym- 
pathetic and mechanical treatment. 

Teaching is a fine art, and, like other arts 
of its kind, it conforms to Longfellow's line : — 

" Art is long, and time is fleeting," 

or, better, from the German: — 

" Die Kunst ist lang und kurz ist unser Leben." 



THE TEACHER AND HIS METHODS 131 

Like painting or music or sculpture, there is 
much room for learning technique, but more 
for the exercise of spontaneity. 

But, we may ask, when is the teacher free ? 
When does he sway most powerfully the 
pupil's mind and interest ? The answer is : 
when he best applies the principles of method 
in accordance with his own individuality. 
Unless there is this freedom of application, 
teaching degenerates at once into routine, in 
which both teacher and pupil are bored. 
Tediousness, says Ilerbart, is the most griev- 
ous fault into which the teacher can be be- 
trayed. 

One of the most serious dangers confronting 
the teacher, and one arising from the large 
number of children to be taught, is that the 
individual will be concealed in the mass. 
In such cases mechanism in memorizing, in 
drilling, in writing, in reproducing, is likely 
to suppress the vital and independent ; it 
tends to crush out or leave undeveloped the 
spontaneity of the individual. There is all 
the more need, therefore, of the elevation of 
teaching to a genuine art. 



132 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

From the relations of spontaneity to mech- 
anism there arise three classes of teachers : — 

1. There are first the ' born ' teachers, 
those who do the right thing by instinct, 
" who breathe without being aware of their 
lungs." We may call them the educational 
geniuses. Somebody says that Agassiz was 
the only teaching genius Harvard ever had. 
Much as this may be doubted, it is certain 
that no university is ever the fortunate pos- 
sessor of many of this kind. There was once 
such a teacher in Greece. Alexander the 
Great had Aristotle for a teacher; yet one 
must at once acknowledge that Aristotle also 
had Alexander the Great for a pupil. Could 
we all have teachers of this type, the world 
might be vastly richer. But, alas ! the educa- 
tional geniuses are few, even though many 
fondly fancy they belong to the class. 
Among such teachers all is S]Dontaneity, per- 
sonality, genius. There is no room for rule 
and there is perhaps no need for it. 

2. Then we have the numerous class who 
may be called the educational artisans. These 
are the teachers who smother personality by 



THE TEACHER AND HIS METHODS 133 

technique. They put themselves and their 
pupils into the straight-jacket of methodologi- 
cal procedure. They subject everything to the 
routine of rule. Personality has small influ- 
ence in what they do. Wrinkles and gray hairs, 
jangled nerves and channelled brains, are the 
early portion of such, for they expose them- 
selves to the arid blasts of their calling, with- 
out experiencing any of the life-giving joys 
it furnishes to their more fortunate colleagues. 

3. We have, finally, the educational artists. 
They are the teachers who value method, but 
do not overvalue it ; who recognize the value 
of personality, but avoid its eccentricity. 
With them freedom conforms to law, for they 
blend the personal and the law-accordant into 
an artistic unity. Personality is governed by 
method; method is permeated by personality. 

With the young, interest in the main fol- 
lows the teacher, not the subject. It is for 
this reason that personality and teaching skill 
are so important in the awakening of the in- 
tellect, the enriching of the mind, the arousing 
of the desires, the direction of the outgoing 
efforts of the soul. 



PERSONAL ELEMENTS IN INSTRUCTION 

Speech — Tem]30 — Tone — Tension 

In all these matters the teacher is the pat- 
tern, whether he will or not. If the teacher's 
mind is alert, the pupil's will be also ; if the 
teacher exhales the sunny influence of good 
humor, the soul of the child will blossom like 
the rose in June ; if the teacher uses correct 
and forceful language, the pupils will strive 
to do the same. But, on the other hand, if 
the teacher bristles with ill-humor, or spite- 
fulness, or sarcasm, or is lax in thought and 
bearing, or slovenly in language, a troop of 
similar ills will spring up in the children. 

More perhaps than anything else, it is the 
voice that denotes character, that reveals the 
good traits, or betrays the weak. By this it 
is not meant that the native quality of the 
voice determines character, for who has not 
134 



PERSONAL ELEMENTS IN INSTRUCTION 135 

known most worthy people with most execrable 
voices, or been obliged to associate mellowness 
of tone with harshness of conduct ? It is rather 
the manner of using the voice nature has given 
us that serves as an index to character. The 
ideal teacher's voice, especially if the teacher 
be a woman, is low, firm, clear, and forceful; 
never harsh, boisterous, or shrill. There is 
no more excruciating sound in nature than a 
thin, shrill, high-pitched, and perhaps also nasal 
voice, especially if at the same time the tone 
betrays ill temper or jangled nerves. It is 
the custom of many undisciplined people to 
follow the law of the piano wire, and raise 
the pitch with each increase of tension. Teach- 
ers afflicted with this infirmity should practise 
deep, full, low tones, increasing force without 
raising pitch. As vocal defects should be 
combated in the teacher, so the so-called 
" school tone " should be discouraged in the 
scholar, for it is a mark of the absence of life 
and interest. Our tones are not mechanical 
when we are dealing with real situations, but 
only when we have fallen into routine, in- 
difference, or dulness. 



136 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

On the other hand, the teacher should avoid 
with all diligence the small, indistinct, feeble 
voice, for its unimpressiveness neither arouses 
to effort nor deters from mischief. It is an 
index of shyness or timidity, or a degree of 
humility incompatible with the forcefulness 
essential in a teacher; or, worst of all, it 
arises from feebleness of will. At times the 
wee small voice seems to be associated with 
indifference, or stolidity, or general ansemia of 
thought. The remedy in such cases is that 
urged by the citizens of Hamelin Town upon 
their council, when they cried: — 

" Rouse up, sirs, give your brains a racking, 
To find the remedy we're lacking, 
Or, sure as fate, we'll send you packing." 

When the student doffs his cap and gown 
to put on the badge of authority in the school- 
room, his speech is usually heavily laden with 
slang and dialect. These must be laid aside 
with college pranks and general academic irre- 
sponsibility. Even such respectable errors as 
" It is me," or " Like I do " are no longer in 
order; while such slang expressions as "stunts," 



PERSONAL ELEMENTS IN INSTRUCTION 137 

" cold feet," or " busted out," are absolutely 
inadmissible. 

Speech should, like the voice, be clear and 
forceful, not loaded with technicalities or for- 
eign terms, or hampered by academic stiffness ; 
but straightforward, simple, vigorous. To men- 
tion the " synthetic unity of transcendental 
apperception " to students who have not read 
Kant's " Critique of Pure Reason," is to daze 
or disgust, as the case may be. Even to stu- 
dents of education who chance not to have 
read Rosenkranz's "Philosophy of Education," 
the expression, " The state must not return to 
the psychological ethical genesis of a negative 
deed " might prove a poser. No thought im- 
portant to a young mind is incapable of expres- 
sion in language comprehensible to that mind. 

By tempo is meant the rate of mental move- 
ment in the recitation ; by tone^ the prevailing 
state of mind, whether grave or gay, subdued 
or elated, strenuous or relaxed. It is evident 
th.2A> tempo and tone must be in accord. To 
read a selection filled with noble earnestness 
of sentiment in light and rapid tones is like 
singing the words of a solemn oratorio to the 



138 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

jigging measure of a street ditty. Who that 
has ever heard the noble music to which the 
words, " He was despised and rejected of men," 
are sung, would not have his feelings outraged 
by a rendition in belittling music ? Fancy 
reading the " Reply to Hayne " in high and 
rapid tones ! The very structure of the com- 
position resists such an effort. — "The eulogium 
pronounced by the honorable gentleman upon 
the character of the state of South Carolina 
meets my hearty concurrence." In such com- 
position tempo answers naturally to tone. 

When, however, it is necessary to drill upon 
memorized matter, either singly or in concert, 
as in reciting the multiplication table or in 
practice upon inflections, speed is desirable. 
The young like excitement when it brings 
elation without confusion. The pulse quickens, 
the blood flows in greater volume to the brain, 
the attention is sharpened, and, unless the ex- 
ercise is too violent, heightened mental power 
and enhanced interest in school work result. 

But, on the other hand, where reflection is 
needed, time must be given. Not that thought 
should be sluggish, but that it should be clear, 



PERSONAL ELEMENTS IN INSTRUCTION 139 

exact, and reliable. The mind that is whipped 
into hair-trigger explosiveness on matters de- 
manding deliberation is almost sure to become 
unreliable in its thought processes. It is cock- 
sure ; but, as Huxley says, " Of all the danger- 
ous mental habits, that which schoolboys call 
cocJcsureness is probably the most perilous." 

The teacher should also strive for variety 
in tone, emphasis, and inflection, not as ends 
in themselves, but as mirrors of a variegated 
thought content ; for nothing is more depressing 
than dead uniformity of voice. 

By class tension we mean the alertness, the 
force, the earnestness, the enthusiasm, with 
which the work of the class proceeds. Here, 
as everywhere, the teacher sets the pace, for a 
lax teacher never had a strenuous class. True 
teaching is hard work. It requires the expendi- 
ture of nervous force. What we would see in 
our pupils, we must first manifest in ourselves. 
Are they to have enthusiasms in their studies? 
The divine glow must first burn in our own 
bosoms ; our feelings are the prototypes of 
theirs. Is the school to be a part of real life 
for our pupils? It must first be real to us. 



140 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

Are the minds of our pupils to be kept up to 
the growing point? A similar tension must 
first possess our own. 

When the minds of our pupils are alert, 
eager, enthusiastic, then they are growing, for 
their education is revealing something of the 
infinite riches of the stored-up mental treasures 
of the race ; then the roots of permanent wax- 
ing interests are striking deep into the soil ; 
then the personality of the teacher is con- 
tributing its share toward forming in the 
minds of the young masses of ideas that shall 
be both clear and vivid. 



r 



XI 

COi^CRETENESS IN INSTRUCTION 

CoNCRETENESS contributes perhaps more 
than any other single phase of instruction 
both to clearness and to vividness. It lays a 
foundation, therefore, for interest. 

It is an old saying that "the road to hell 
is paved with abstractions." However this 
may be in theology, it is certain that in edu- 
cation a path so paved rarely leads to the 
goal of vivid ideas. Some of the reasons why 
it does not are as follows : — 

1. The teaching of abstractions, mostly empty 
to the pupil, begets a habit of vain memorizing. 
Not understanding clearly the meaning of the 
generalizations placed before him, yet being 
required to have at least the semblance of 
comprehension, the pupil resorts to his mem- 
ory. The teacher who is easily satisfied with 
words will be content with accurate verbal 
reproduction. 

141 



142 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

2. But the memorizing of subject matter im- 
perfectly understood begets a growing foggi- 
ness of vision. A meaningless abstraction 
frequently repeated acquires a familiarity that 
soon passes for knowledge. This is seen with 
adults when they juggle with, but do not 
master, the terms in speculative philosophy. 
It is a new social phenomenon among the 
masses who have learned to read but not to 
think, that any exploded theory of ancient phi- 
losophy may become a cult claiming its thou- 
sands of devotees, provided its high-sounding 
abstractions be tinged with religious sentiment, 
or gilded with promise of practical usefulness. 
But if adults may so easily be induced to 
dwell among the fogs by feeding on abstrac- 
tions, what shall we say of the children and 
youths who are fed with the same indigesti- 
ble mental food? 

3. Another way of saying the same thing 
is to point out the fact that the memorizing 
of rules and definitions not yet understood 
leads to the substitution of words for ideas. 
Lotze tells us that all strivings of the mental 
life not only begin with the concrete percep- 



CONCKETENESS IN INSTKUCTION 143 

tions of the senses, but that they ever return 
to them to obtain material and starting points 
for new development of the mind's activity. ^ 
If this be true, the road paved with abstrac- 
tions is the road away from interest, away from 
vivid and life-giving thought. 

Concreteness arises from the use of objects 
or of pictures or of individual and striking 
illustrations. We can make words alone thrill 
with the intensity that comes of direct per- 
ception, for the imagination can be made to 
furnish an inner concrete vision comparable 
to the reality itself. Such words are well 
chosen, rich in sensuous elements, plastic in 
tone, full of spirit, always dealing with specific 
facts or particular events. Indeed, many peo- 
ple have the happy gift of transmuting the 
commonplace into the interesting, or even the 
important, solely by means of spirited narration. 
What seems prosaic enough to the ordinary 
observer becomes irresistibly comical, or pass- 
ing strange, or humanly pathetic, when thrown 
upon the screen of consciousness by the words 

1 " Mikrokosmos," II, p. 176. 



144 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

of one who sees the significance in the pano- 
rama of the day's experiences. The teacher, 
above all others, needs to have the philoso- 
pher's stone, the power of turning into gold 
what would otherwise be dross. 

The inner vision of teacher and pupil should 
coincide. The world of words should go over 
into the world of things in the mind of the 
learner. This coincidence and inner illumina- 
tion may be brought about in many ways. 
We may, for instance, compare the strange and 
distant with the familiar and near. The past 
exists as an element of the present. There 
is no victory of human liberty in the bygone 
ages that does not find its embodiment in some 
aspect of modern society. Alchemy led to 
chemistry, and astrology to astronomy. Our 
present industrial implements and machines 
have their prototypes for the most part in 
those of olden times. No touch of human, 
nature portrayed in myth or legend is entirely 
eliminated from our own characters. It fol- 
lows, then, that if we seek the strange in the 
familiar, we shall in most cases find it. A 
false scientific pride often prevents the graduate 



CONCRETENESS IN INSTRUCTION 145 

of the university from using the most potent 
means for securing the greatest clearness and 
vividness of ideas. The understanding of the 
young has its roots in the home, the play- 
ground, the family, the woods, the meadows or 
fields, the village or tlie city. He is the wise 
teacher who takes note of this fact, and anchors 
every conception in the experience of the 
learner. 

The natural sciences, properly taught, furnish 
the most fertile fields for the growth of con- 
crete ideas. They have to do with objects in 
countless variety, with cause producing its 
effect before the eyes. In these studies the 
senses are always active. We are ever called 
upon to see, to handle, to hear, to touch, to 
experiment. Thus, in the study of plants and 
minerals and animals, the eye and the hand are 
called into constant activity. We distinguish 
form and color, structure and surface. We 
perceive the smooth, the clean, the light, the 
heavy, the firm, and the yielding. Surfaces, 
points, lines, angles, engage our attention. 
We count and measure and use instruments. 
When objects are absent, we may compare them 



146 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

with those present, or we may use the photo- 
graph or the stereopticon. Even the specu- 
lations of biological science can be made vivid 
by the use of fossil objects. All the natural 
sciences are made more concrete by experiment, 
but this is especially true of physics and 
chemistry. The principle of the siphon may 
be made concrete by the use of a bent rubber 
tube, or that of the pump with a straight lamp 
chimney fitted with the necessary rod and 
valves. 

In arithmetic we may render the ideas con- 
crete by the use of blocks, as in the Speer 
method,^ and by many other devices for measur- 
ing and illustrating. In geometry we may 
lend concreteness to notions by measuring, 
folding, paper-cutting, comparing, and super- 
posing. Messrs. Beman and Smith have given 
us a translation of " Row's Geometric Exercises 
in Paper Folding," ^ which enables the teacher 
to render a large part of geometry perfectly 
concrete, and hence of fascinating interest. 

In geography, ideas are rendered concrete 

1 Ginn & Co., Boston, New York, Chicago. 

2 lUd, 



CONCEETENESS IN INSTRUCTION 147 

by spontaneous observation and by directed 
experience. Pictures, maps, and globes, as 
well as oral descriptions, are aids to concrete- 
ness. Geography is more difficult than nature 
study in this respect, however, for the remote 
must always be pictured to the mind through 
comparison with the near. 

History makes a larger draft upon the imagi- 
nation than the subjects just mentioned, yet it 
is possible to fill it so full of concrete vividness 
that it will become the most fascinating of all 
studies. As already remarked, the past lives in 
the present, and it is through the present it 
must be made to live again. Whittier's boyish 
schoolmaster understood the art of making his 
hearers see the old in the new. 

" Hapi3y the snow-locked homes wherein 
He tuned his merry violin, 
Or played the athlete in the barn, 
Or held the good dame's winding-yarn, 
Or mirth-provoking versions told, 
Of classic legends, rare and old. 
Wherein the scenes of Greece and Rome 
Had all the commonplace of home, 
And little seemed at best the odds 
'Twixt Yankee pedlers and old gods : 



148 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

Where Pindus-born Araxes took 
The guise of any grist-mill brook, 
And dread Olympus at his will 
Became a huckleberry hill." ^ 

Olympic games become more real when com- 
pared with our modern forms of athletics. 
The past may be read, too, in monuments, 
buildings, castles, forts, etc. The foreign-born 
child has the advantage of being able to see 
many ruins of forts and buildings, many monu- 
ments and historic works of art; but pictures, 
aided by such art and historic remains as we 
have, are no mean substitutes. 

Linguistic instruction suffers somewhat in 
vivid objectivity, for it is through inner per- 
ception that words must gain life and color. 
In the study of English poetry, we must avoid 
the too early or too frequent use of abstract 
terms like metonymy^ metaphor^ synecdoche^ etc., 
or the reduction of classic dramas to skeleton 
outlines, thus robbing them of flesh and blood. 
On the contrary, emphasis should be laid upon 
the inner life and power of the contents ; stress 
should be placed upon the personalities por- 

1 "Snowbound." 



CONCRETENESS IN INSTRUCTION 149 

trayed, upon the development of their thoughts 
and actions. It is ever life that stimulates life. 
In the study of foreign languages we gain 
concreteness by comparing their characteristics 
of word and structure with the characteristics 
of the mother tongue. It is a happy circum- 
stance for language teaching that nearly a third 
of our vocabulary comes to us from Latin 
through the French, while the body of English 
is of Anglo-Saxon origin. The teacher of Latin, 
French, or German, therefore, need rarely be 
at a loss to find in English a basis for the com- 
prehension of any one of these languages. 

Translation, to be effective, must never 
descend to the level of the puzzle, or become a 
mechanical process, but it must thrill with life 
and vigor; the thought to be discovered must 
seem a precious message to be unearthed like a 
gem from a mine. It need hardly be said that 
to make a foreign language concrete, there 
must be no premature emphasis upon the 
grammar alone, for grammar is at best a useful 
instrument, like a spade. If it is made an end 
in itself, we lose at once concreteness, vivid- 
ness, and interest. 



XII 

ORAL PRESENTATION 

The oldest thing in education is the voice of 
the teacher addressing itself to the ear of the 
learner. It is the primitive method of teaching. 
By this means Homer imbibed his knowledge of 
the Greek heroes. By it he imparted to the 
world the wonderful creations of his mind. 
Mr. Denton J. Snyder has pictured to us the 
poet at his mother's knee, listening with glow- 
ing soul to her stories of the ancient heroes and 
Olympian gods : ^ — 

" She would begin with a glow in her eyes and tell me 
their story, 

Meanwhile plying the distaff — she never could help 
being busy — 

All of their tales she knew, by the hundreds and hun- 
dreds she knew them. 

Tales of the beings divine, once told of their dealings 
with mankind, 

1 " Homer in Chios," Sigma Publishing Co., Chicago. 
150 



OEAL PRESENTATION 151 

When they came to our earth and visibly mingled with 

mortals. 
New was always the word on the tongue of Cretheis 

my mother, 
Though she dozens of times before had told the same 

story, 
Still repeating when I would call for it, ever repeating, 
For a good tale, like the sun, doth shine one day as the 

other. 
What a spell on her lips when up from her lap I was 

looking, 
Watching her mouth in its motion, whence dropped 

those wonderful stories ! 
Oft I thought I could pick up her word in my hand as 

it fell there. 
Keep it and carry it off, for my play a most beautiful 

plaything. 
Which I could toss on the air when I chose, like a ball 

or an apple. 
Catch it again as it fell in its flight, for the word was a 

thing then. 
Mark I what I as a child picked up, the old man still 

plays with : 
Words made of breath, but laden with thought more 

solid than granite. 
Pictures of heroes in sound that lasts, when spoken, 

forever. 
Images fair of the world and marvellous legends afore- 
time. 
All of them living in me as they fell from the lips of 

my mother." 



152 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

It is evident that a method once almost the 
sole reliance of the race for educating the 
young must still possess virtue, even in this age 
of books and pictures. To examine the scope 
and usefulness of oral presentation as a means 
of forming clear and vivid ideas in the minds of 
the young is the purpose of this section. 

We need, first of all, to see the difference 
between the monologue and the dialogue. In 
the former the speaker not only does all the 
talking, but usually all the thinking. What- 
ever we may think of the lecture method in the 
university, one need not reflect long to see that 
it is not well adapted to the instruction of the 
young. Unless the lecture is so fascinating as 
to rest under the suspicion of not teaching 
what the children need to learn, the passivity of 
the hearers is likely to lead to inattention and 
ultimately to disorder. But even if the children 
are attentive and orderly, it is almost certain 
that they will neither learn accurately nor think 
well, for the lecturer is prone to pour out knowl- 
edge too rapidly, while the children have no 
incentive and no opportunity to do any real 
thinking. The mind is carried on from point 



ORAL PRESENTATION 153 

to point by the stimulus of the lecturer's words. 
The pupil has nothing to do but to allow the 
train of ideas to follow the lead of the teacher. 
He does not in the least direct it himself. The 
process is not unlike that in revery, in which 
the mental panorama unrolls itself as it will. 
There may be much more intensity in the case 
of a good lecture, and hence a correspondingly 
greater impression, but even at its best the 
lecture does little to impart knowledge or to 
stimulate real thinking. 

It is an illusion to suppose that because one 
talks one thereby necessarily teaches. There is 
a vast difference between telling and teaching. 
In genuine teaching we must see that knowl- 
edge is so acquired that it may be a real posses- 
sion, and we must see that the mind of the 
learner is active enough to perceive and feel 
the significance of what is learned. This 
means that the new lesson must be associated 
with related knowledge already acquired, and it 
means also that the principles underlying the 
new facts must be fully appreciated through 
actual thinking. 

In ancient Greece it was the Sophists who 



154 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

used the monologue exclusively. They simply 
lectured to the people, holding that there 
was no need of debate, since this would but 
reveal difference of opinion. But, they said, 
if each man has his own opinion, and has a 
right to it, then there is no use in discuss- 
ing at all, for no conclusion can be reached. 
The result of this theory was that each Sophist 
went from place to place telling his own 
opinions and giving no one a chance to com- 
bat them. He finall}^ held openly that, since 
difference of opinion leads to no conclusion, 
each man must himself be the measure of truth 
for himself. Under such circumstances it is 
evident that science could not exist. There 
would be no room for anything but opinion. 

It is well for the progress of the world that a 
wiser man, in the person of Socrates, appeared 
to confound the Sophists and to lead men to 
see that such a thing as science can exist. For 
knowledge of any kind to be scientific, it must 
become subject to laws and principles which 
are seen to be independent of the opinions of 
individuals. If we still had 'opinions' about 
the truths of the multiplication table, we should 



ORAL PRESENTATION 155 

have no science of mathematics. Socrates 
used, not the monologue, but the dialogue, in 
his endeavors to get at the truth of things. 
Being able to ask questions and to use the 
answers, he soon sifted out those opinions that 
were self-contradictory. In this way he was 
able to reduce experience to rule and principle. 
The teacher's problem, however, is not pre- 
cisely that of Socrates, for, instead of overturn- 
ing a false system of ideas, the teacher must try 
to secure an adequate comprehension of systems 
of thought everywhere recognized to be true. 
But if he uses the method of the monologue, 
he is likely to make authority take the place 
of insight, to substitute passing impression for 
careful, thoughtful mastery. The fundamental 
difficulty with the lecture method is that it 
secures little or no response from the student. 
As an occasional means of arousing interest 
in a subject, of giving a point of view, of 
showing the broader meaning of our daily work, 
thus giving a telescopic glimpse into the future, 
the lecture is invaluable. But if we spend 
all our time gazing at the future through the 
glass, we shall never arrive at the distant goal. 



156 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

Interchange of thought, through question 
and answer, through explanation, description, 
and exposition, in short, through the dia- 
logue, is therefore the indispensable requisite 
of useful oral presentation. 

The length and character of the oral work 
will depend upon the age of the pupils and 
the nature of the subject matter. The man- 
ner of the presentation should be open and 
free, calculated to hold the eye and to keep 
the attention. The minds of the children must 
be kept on the alert by thought-inciting ques- 
tions. Dictation of matter to be copied is out 
of place, because time-consuming, and depress- 
ing to lively interest; but condensed headings 
should be written upon the blackboard. If 
brief and pointed, the writing by the teacher 
and the copying by the pupil will not interrupt 
the progress of the presentation ; it will con- 
duce rather both to mastery of the subject and 
to interest in it. 

Narration of events in the form of stories 
or vivid description of what has happened is 
the simplest, and at the same time perhaps the 



OEAL PRESENTATION 15T 

most effective, kind of oral presentation. A 
good story-teller claims instant and constant 
attention. He knocks at all doors, — humor, 
gladness, sadness, pity, exultation, fear; he 
rouses to action or subdues rebellious feelings ; 
he softens to kindness where only callousness 
formerly existed; he can, in short, through 
proper selection of subject matter, and by sym- 
pathetic narration, produce, at least for the 
time being, any worthy effect upon his pupils 
that he may deem desirable. 

Narration of this kind can be used effectively 
at times in every subject, but it is of special 
service in languages, in history, and in the 
natural sciences. One who is teaching natural 
history should avail himself of such literary 
treasures as the works of William J. Longi 
and Ernest Seton-Thompson.2 i^ the earlier 
grades, where imagination plays a more prom- 
inent part, Kipling's "Jungle Books" will be 
most helpful. With the early grades, it is 
best for the teacher to adhere closely to what 

1 " Beasts of the Field " and " Fowls of the Air." Ginn 
& Co., Boston, New York, and Chicago. 

2 " Some Wild Animals I have Known." 



158 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

has been put into permanent literary form. 
This should be narrated as nearly in the words 
of the original as possible, for much of the 
charm of such matter depends upon the form. 

The pupils should have frequent opportunity 
to reproduce what has been narrated. In this 
way they absorb a large body of correct and 
even elegant language, which frequent repro- 
duction makes their own. This method can 
even be used in the teaching of modern foreign 
languages, much to the advantage of the pupil's 
fluency in using the strange tongue. The 
teacher should narrate freely, not hampered 
by the book. Some teachers can read almost 
as well as they can narrate, but a story read 
often reminds one of an eagle walking. The 
eagle is free in his movements only when fly- 
ing. So the narration of the teacher only 
reaches its greatest excellence when he is un- 
impeded by the book. In the case of extended 
narration, the story should be told and retold 
section by section. 

The art of describing is far more diflicult 
than that of narrating, and for a very good 
reason, which Lessing long since pointed out in 



ORAL PRESENTATION 159 

his book, "Laocoon."^ Narration describes 
that which happens in time ; description tells 
of that which exists in space. In following 
the unfolding of events as they happen one 
after another, the narration simply follows the 
natural order of cause and effect, each part 
of the story coinciding with its own particular 
phase of the progress of events. In other 
words, the time elements of the story cor- 
respond to the time elements of the original 
occurrence. In the case of description, how- 
ever, though there is a time element in the 
oral presentation as before, there is no cor- 
responding time progress in the thing de- 
scribed. The description moves on, but the 
object does not. The mind must therefore 
hold constantly before itself the elements of 
the thing described, joining the one to the 
other as the description proceeds. This is why 
it is hard to describe effectively, and why a de- 
scription is hard to follow even when it is clear. 
What could be simpler than a bed of flowers, 
yet how few can make an adequate mental 
picture from even a good description ? The 
1 Translation, The Macmillan Co., New York. 



160 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

reader may try his own powers upon tlie follow- 
ing, which certainly does not leave a vague 
impression because of any literary fault : — 

" There does the noble Gentian raise his head 
High o'er the troop of common plants, 
Beneath its standard serves a tribe of flowers ; 
Its own bine brother bows and honors it. 
While golden pyramids of brilliant flowers 
Cling round the stem and crown its robe of green, 
The leaves of brilliant white, with deepest green, 
Streaked and inlaid throughout, are seen to glow 
With the moist diamond's many-colored rays, 
Most righteous law ! uniting strength with grace, 
In the fair body dwells the fairer soul. 
Here creeps a lowly plant like some gray mist, 
Its leaves by nature shaped as cruciform ; 
Two gilded beaks formed by the lovely flower 
Spring from a bird made out of amethyst. 
Here a bright finger-fashioned leaf doth cast 
Its green reflection m the limpid stream. 
The flower of snow, with purple lightly tinged, 
Environed by the white rays of a star ; 
Emeralds and roses deck the trodden heath. 
And cliffs are covered with a purple robe." 

For the sake of contrast, the reader may 
try a somewhat longer selection in which 
events, unfolding in a time order, keep pace 
with the march of the narration. There is 



ORAL PRESENTATION 161 

no difficulty now in vivid apprehension, either 
of the story, or of the descriptive elements it 
contains. 

" A greater omen, and of worse portent, 
Did our unwary minds with fear torment, 
Concurring to produce the dire event. 
Laocoon, Neptune's priest by lot that year, 
With solemn pomp then sacrificed a steer ; 
When (dreadful to behold) from sea we spied 
Two serpents, ranked abreast, the seas divide, 
And smoothly sweep along the swelling tide. 
Their flaming crests above the waves they show; 
Their bellies seem to burn the seas below ; 
Their speckled tails advance to steer their course. 
And on the sounding shore the flying billows force. 
And now the strand, and now the plain they held. 
Their ardent eyes with bloody streaks were filled ; 
Their nimble tongues they brandished as they came 
And licked their hissing jaws, that sputtered flame. 
We fled amazed : their destined way they take, 
And to Laocoon and his children make ; 
And first around the tender boys they wind. 
Then with their sharpened fangs their limbs and bodies 

grind. 
Their wretched father, running to their aid 
With pious haste, but vain, they next invade; 
Twice round his waist their winding volumes rolled ; 
And twice about his gasping throat they fold. 
The priest thus doubly choked — their crests divide, 
And towering o'er his head in triumph ride. 



162 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

With both his hands he labors at the knots ; 

His holy fillets the blue venom blots ; 

His roaring fills the flitting air around. 

Thus when an ox receives a glancing wound, 

He breaks the bands, the fatal altar flies, 

And with loud bello wings breaks the yielding skies." 

The entire "Laocoon" is devoted to a dis- 
cussion of the natural limitations of poetry on 
the one side, and painting and sculpture on 
the other. In poetry (and narration) the time 
element is all important, so that description 
as such is unnatural to it; whereas in painting 
the space element is all important, so that the 
effort to portray events by means of painting 
or sculpture must necessarily prove ineffective. 
The book opens with a discussion of why the 
mouth of "Laocoon" in the famous statue of 
that name is so nearly closed, when the natural 
thing for a Greek to do under such circum- 
stances would be to shriek aloud, as Virgil 
makes " Laocoon " do. Winkelmann and others 
had explained the half-closed position of the 
mouth as being due to ' classic repose ' ; but 
Lessing points out that to have made the 
mouth wide open, as it would be in screaming, 



ORAL PRESENTATION 163 

would be to reduce to a permanent space 
condition that which is only a passing time 
state. This is the reason why we do not like a 
smile in a photograph. A smile is a transient 
thing, whose charm is due to its creation and 
its disappearance. A permanent smile becomes 
a kind of petrified grin. It follows that descrip- 
tion is a sort of word-painting, and is a substi- 
tute for what should be a real painting to be 
an adequate representation of the reality. 

The "Laocoon" will well repay a careful 
reading on the part of the teacher who 
desires to see the true scope and the limita- 
tions both of narration and description. It is 
of course invaluable in furnishing canons of 
art criticism. 

Difficult though the art of describing may 
be, it is still indispensable in the teaching of 
nearly all school subjects. It is particularly 
needed in geography and nature work, in 
history and in language. The art can best be 
studied in the few poets and novelists who, 
like Scott, excel in descriptive power. In 
describing an animal or a plant the life his- 
tory of the object, as from seed to fruit, or 



164 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

from birth to death, lends concreteness, and 
helps to supply the time movement so impor- 
tant in narration. In biography a similar 
device may be used, the history of a man 
being traced from the cradle to the grave. 
One can enliven the description of a mineral 
by giving it a place in human affairs ; as, for 
instance, as an element in a bridge or a 
building or a locomotive. When an object is 
present, its description is greatly assisted by 
this fact alone. The description will natu- 
rally proceed by actual or ideal separation of 
the object into its elements, each of which 
will be seen in relation to the other elements 
and to the whole. Here a right order is im- 
portant, as in the description of leaves and 
insects. It is an excellent exercise for the 
pupil to try to make clear to others that 
which he has himself discovered. If a dis- 
tant plant or animal is to be described, the 
genetic order already mentioned is extremely 
important. 

The aspect of oral presentation that we 
call exposition is so important that a separate 
section must be devoted to it. 



XIII 

THE ART OF EXPOSITION- 

It is a nice point in teaching to know 
what things need exposition; it is an equally 
important one to know to what extent they 
need it. While it is quite possible to make 
a philosophic exposition of the implications 
to be found in a story like that of Simple 
Simon, yet such labor is lost on the child 
young enough to enjoy the rhymes. Old 
King Cole can't be made merrier by explana- 
tion, nor Little Jack Horner any better. A 
Mother Goose story is its own best revelation 
to the child. On the other hand, almost any 
phase of any subject of school instruction 
may at times need exposition. 

Everything turns upon the relation of the 
point to be understood to the stage of mental 
advancement in the learner. One mind, for 
instance, grasps the nature of a demonstration 
with perfect ease, another feels it but dimly 
165 



166 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

or not at all ; one can travel with seven- 
league boots through the stages of a mathe- 
matical process, another must take every 
step, however short, or falter by the way. 
The imagination of one pupil is lively and 
clear, while that of another flies with leaden 
wings; one student has illuminating knowl- 
edge, while another's light is darkness. One 
boy remembers and thinks in a flash; the 
mind of another is a sieve which holds only 
dross. In short, that which needs exposition 
is as manifold as subject matter and mind. 
It is evident, therefore, that the teacher 
must know both his subject and the mind of 
his pupil. 

To descend somewhat to details, it is clear 
that that which is remote in time or distant 
in space may be out of immediate relation to 
the experience of the pupils, hence be in need 
of more or less exposition. History always 
makes large drafts upon the imagination, for 
a prosaic present may furnish but scant basis 
for constructing a long-vanished scene. It 
may be difficult to disentangle from the pres- 
ent the elements of political life that had 



THE ART OF EXPOSITION 167 

their genesis in the Orient, or in the Occi- 
dent of long ago. Yet if ancient history is 
to have the vividness that comes from a 
sense of its reality, the chasm of years must 
be bridged, the past must live again in the 
present. The meaning of obscure poetry may 
often be made clear by illustration and para- 
phrase, while its spirit may often be imparted 
by sympathetic and appreciative reading. Mr. 
John Burroughs has only scorn for efforts to 
find the heart of literature by means of liter- 
ary dissection. 1 He says : " If the teacher, 
by his own living voice and an occasional 
word of comment, can bring out the soul of 
a work, he may help the student's apprecia- 
tion of it, he may, in a measure, impart to 
him his own larger and more intelligent 
appreciation of it. And that is a true ser- 
vice. 

" Young men and women actually go to col- 
lege to take a course in Shakespeare or Chaucer 
or Dante or the Arthurian legends. The course 
becomes a mere knowledge course. My own 
first acquaintance with Milton was through an 
1 " Literary Values," Century, April, 1902. 



168 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

exercise in grammar. We parsed 'Paradise 
Lost.' Much of the current college study of 
Shakespeare is little better than parsing him. 
The class falls upon the text like hens upon a 
bone in winter ; no meaning of word or phrase 
escapes them, every line is literally picked to 
pieces ; but of the poet himself, of that which 
makes him what he is, how much do they get? 
Very little, I fear. They have had an intellec- 
tual exercise and not an emotional experience. 
They have added to their knowledge, but have 
not taken a step in culture. To dig into the roots 
and origins of the great poets is like digging 
into the roots of an oak or maple, the better to 
increase your appreciation of the beauty of the 
tree. There stands the tree in all its summer 
glory \ will you really know it any better after 
you have laid bare every root and rootlet? 
There stand Homer, Dante, Chaucer, Shake- 
speare. Read them, give yourself to them, and 
master them if you are man enough. The 
poets are not to be analyzed, they are to be 
enjoyed ; they are not to be studied, but to be 
loved ; they are not for knowledge, but for cul- 
ture, to enhance our appreciation of life and our 



THE ART OF EXPOSITION 169 

mastery over its elements. All the mere facts 
about a poet's work are as chaff compared with 
the appreciation of one fine line or fine sentence. 
Why study a great poet at all after the manner 
of the dissecting room ? Why not rather seek 
to make the acquaintance of his living soul and 
to feel its power ? " 

There are things to say about the teaching of 
literature which this article does not consider, 
but Mr. Burroughs is right about the futility of 
searching for an emotion with a scalpel. 

The exposition of terms by use of definitions, 
themselves needing to be defined, is usually 
futile, for it is like an effort to verify equations 
with unknown quantities. It is better to rely 
on illustrations. Instead, for example, of defin- 
ing envy as " A feeling of uneasiness, mortifica- 
tion, or discontent excited by the contemplation 
of another's superiority, prosperity, or success, 
accompanied with some degree of enmity or 
malignity, and often or usually with a desire or 
an effort to discomfit or mortify the person 
envied," ^ it is better to ask a few questions, 
thus: Did you ever hear of an envious man? 
1 Century Dictionary. 



170 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

By what feelings did he show his envy ? By 
what actions? 

A rule has been given us for exposition, 
which it were well to heed. It is, " As little as 
possible, as much as necessary." ^ Exposition 
is not an end, but a means. Some teachers are 
possessed to demonstrate self-evident proposi- 
tions ; some use a wilderness of words in mono- 
logue to accomplish what a few questions would 
better effect. Who has not seen teachers, not 
to say professors, spending the whole recitation 
hour day after day in solving problems for their 
students ? These monologues in crayon are no 
more effective than monologues in words. 

There are two chief types of exposition ; 
namely, (1) the type that pertains to the forms 
for expressing ideas, and (2) that which pertains 
to the ideas themselves. 

Verbal expositions relate to words, sentences, 
figures of speech, and the like. Strange words 
must be explained by means of familiar ones, 
complicated grammatical structure must be 
simplified, long periods often need to be 
broken up into short ones, highly figurative 
1 " So wenig wie moglich, so viel als notig." 



THE ART OF EXPOSITION 171 

language must be made plain by familiar 
forms of speech. All the teacher's resources 
of philology, grammar, and rhetoric are likely, 
sooner or later, to be needed in rendering 
language comprehensible to his pupils. 

The greatest need for exposition, however, 
is in the realm of reality, whether of thought 
or of things. Ideas, conceptions, judgments, 
laws, principles, relations, often lie beyond the 
pupil's unaided power of comprehension. A 
political principle, for example, like that of 
local self-government can only be truly ap- 
prehended when on the one hand we see what 
its ultimate consequences are for the political 
well-being of the people, and on the other 
what evils its absence entails. 

In expositions of this kind that which is 
abstract must be made concrete by appeal 
to examples, experiences, descriptions, and the 
like. Complex ideas must be analyzed into 
simple ones, objects must be compared as to 
their similarities and their differences, events 
must be examined both from the standpoint of 
their causes and their consequences. Ancient 
history is illuminated by showing its reflection 



172 



INTEREST AND EDUCATION 



in recent experience, while recent history gets 
new meaning when its elements are seen to 
be embodied in the history of other times, 
countries, and peoples. Even so abstruse a 
matter as a geometrical proposition may be 
made much more vivid, first by appeal to 
experience and history, and then by lucid 
presentation of essential points. Taking for 
illustration the proposition respecting the 
square on the hypotenuse of a right triangle, 
we may approach the more vigorous demon- 
stration by illustrative methods, which will 
lend interest to the problem and throw light 
upon it. 

For the first illustration, construct a mosaic 
in the form of squares, as follows: It will be 



a ■ \ y 



THE ART OF EXPOSITION 173 

seen that the square on the hypotenuse he 
consists of four triangular pieces, and that 
the squares on the lines ah and ac consist of 
two such pieces each. 

We gather from the history of mathematics 
that Pythagoras, whose name this proposition 
bears, probably learned from the Egyptians 
that three lines in the ratio of three, four, and 
five will make a right-angle triangle. It re- 
quires only a little reflection to see that the 
square of five, the hypotenuse, equals the 
sum of the squares of three and four. We 
have thus a second special instance of the 
truth of this proposition. It will add to the 
interest if we relate the legend that, upon 
making this discovery, Pythagoras sacrificed 
a hecatomb to celebrate it. 

Unless the teacher is in haste to attack the 
ordinary Euclidian demonstration, it will be 
worth while to spend a recitation period in 
examining the ocular demonstration made by 
the Hindoo, Bhaskara, 1114, a.d. His figure is 
constructed by allowing the square on the hy- 
potenuse to enclose the triangle, and in making 
each of the other sides of the enclosing square 



174 



INTEREST AND EDUCATION 



the hypotenuse of another inscribed right tri- 
angle of the same dimensions as the first. In 
the middle will remain a small square, each 
side of which is the difference between the 
long and the short leg of the triangle. The 
figure is as follows : — 




By rearranging these triangles into two 
rectangles at right angles to each other, with 
the small square placed in the corner, we have 
an ocular demonstration which the pupils can 
verify by drawing, cutting out, and rearrang- 
ing. The whole area is the sum of the squares 
of the two sides ; it is also the square on the 
hypotenuse. Rearranged, the figure is as 
follows : — 



THE ART OF EXPOSITION 



175 





\ 




"hS 


a 




v" 


^ 



The only explanation that Bhaskara vouchsafes 
is the single word, Behold! It is enough. 

Approaching now the regular Euclidian 
demonstration, construct the triangle ahc with 
the squares lying outside, as follows, p. 176: 
Drop the line ai perpendicular to cb^ thus 
dividing the square on the hypotenuse into 
two rectangles. It may be surmised that the 
rectangle lid is equal to the square 5/, and 
that the' rectangle ci is equal to the square 
eg. This surmise is to be tested to see if it 
is correct. 



176 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 




THE ART OF EXPOSITION 177 

A good exposition in such a case as this will 
not simply tell the pupils the whole process 
of proof, but will rather make the essential 
steps stand out one by one as solvable prob- 
lems. Such a method gives the help that is 
needed, and withholds that which is not 
needed. The minds of the students may well 
be turned to the following points: — 

1. Are of and hg continuous straight lines? 
Why? 

2. Can the rectangle hi and the square hf 
be compared directly? No. Why not? Can 
their halves, the triangles hhd and hea be 
compared directly ? Why not ? (Not similar.) 

3. Is it possible to make a triangle equal 
to hdhl -Yes, hda. How do you know the 
two triangles are equal? How can you 
construct a triangle equal to heal Join ec. 
Reason for equality? 

4. What part of the rectangle hi is the 
triangle hadl Reason? What part of the 
square hf is the triangle heel Reason? 

5. Is the triangle had equal to the triangle 
heel Yes. (Two sides and included angle 
of the one equal to two sides and included 



178 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

angle of the other.) How do you know the 
included angles are equal? 

6. Do we know now that the rectangle hi is 
equal to the square hf? Why? 

7. In a similar manner, prove that the 
rectangle ci is equal to the square c^. 

8. Are we now sure that the square on the 
hypotenuse ho is equal to the sum of the 
squares on the legs ha and ac? Reason? 

In briefer form the real problems in this 
proposition are : — 

1. To see that cf and hg are respectively 
continuous straight lines. 

2. To construct similar triangles equal to 
half the rectangle hi and half the square hf. 

3. To compare the rectangle hi and the 
square hf by comparing their halves to two 
similar triangles. Everything else is merely 
the application of axioms. 



XIV 

THE ART OF QUESTIONING 

To question well is to teach well. In the 
skilful use of the question more than in 
anything else lies the fine art of teaching ; for 
in it we have the guide to clear and vivid 
ideas, the quick spur to imagination, the 
stimulus to thought, the incentive to action. 
The question leads us to perceive the implica- 
tions involved, but hitherto unrecognized, in 
our knowledge, it helps us to comprehend the 
principles underlying knowledge and conduct, 
and it enables us to focus our minds in 
recalling what we have learned. 

To the lawyer the question is a weapon of 
offence and defence; to the teacher it is a 
means of securing growth, for it can turn in- 
difference into interest, torpidity into activity, 
ignorance into knowledge. By means of the 
question the teacher can keep the mind of 
the pupil up to the growing point, making 
179 



180 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

it at once alert and thoughtful. The ques- 
tion is, in short, the universal implement of 
good teaching, applicable to all ages of pupils 
and suitable to all stages of instruction. 

For convenience, questions may be grouped 
into four classes, as follows: — 

1. Analytical, 

2. Development, 

3. Review, 

4. Examination. 

The purpose of the first is to analyze knowl- 
edge into its elements, in order to bring its 
implications to consciousness. From the nature 
of numerator and denominator of the common 
fraction, for instance, we may easily derive 
the methods of adding, subtracting, multiply- 
ing, and dividing fractions. The denominator 
shows the number of parts into which a unit 
has been divided; hence shows the size of the 
parts. The numerator shows how many of 
the parts are taken. The value of the frac- 
tion, therefore, depends upon two things; 
namely, the size of the parts and their num- 
ber.- Then, for example, to multiply the value 



THE ART OF QUESTIONING 181 

of the fraction we may either multiply the 
number of parts, which is done by multiplying 
the numerator, or we may multiply the size 
of the parts, which is done by dividing the de- 
nominator. Analytical questions will reveal 
all these relations to the pupil. 

The purpose of the development question 
is to aid the pupil in arriving at a clear 
comprehension of classes, rules, principles, and 
other forms of generalization. It is particu- 
larly applicable in the inductive approach to 
general truths, but it is equally serviceable in 
making verifications of principles that have 
been assumed. 

The purpose of review and of examination 
questions is evident from their names. 

It is self-evident that all questions should 
be definite, comprehensible, and thought-pro- 
voking. These are general characteristics 
which are always acknowledged in theory, 
though not always secured in practice. It is 
not uncommon for examiners of teachers to 
ask for and be satisfied with a mere enumera- 
tion of such qualities. These enumerations 
are as useless as they are easy. Their value 



182 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

as guides to teaching is comparable to the 
value of the prescription for learning the 
French language in eleven days, which was 
to divide the French language into eleven 
parts and to learn one part each day! 

We get no real light on the art of ques- 
tioning until we consider in detail the special 
characteristics that make questions good or 
bad. So numerous are these that we shall 
not be able to survey the field adequately 
without a somewhat careful enumeration. 

Special Characteristics of Questions 

1. Avoid : (a) Obscure expressions ; as, What 
are the logical presuppositions of a peaceful 
state of mind? 

(5) Foreign words ; as. What was the raison 
d'etre of the coup d'etat of the third Napoleon ? 

(c) Technical expressions ; as. What valence 
does the study of vegetal functions produce? 

(d) Figurative expressions; as, What dread 
portent does the roaring of the lion body 
forth? 

2. Avoid questions that are so general as 
to constitute world conundrums ; as, 



THE ART OF QUESTIONING 183 

What political institutions are founded upon 
the principle of popular sovereignty? 

What is the fundamental principle of Chris- 
tianity ? 

What are the presuppositions of manhood 
suffrage ? 

What is civilization? 

3. Avoid complex or obscure questions; as, 
Wherein consisted the originality of the 

genius of Napoleon? 

What was the most epoch-making event of 
the Franco-Prussian War ? 

Which phenomena of the fratricidal strife 
in the American Republic were most deter- 
minative of the ultimate fate of the nation? 
•^ " Who chased whom around the walls of 
what?"i 

4. Avoid double questions; as, 

What form has the valley and what kind 
of a view does it furnish? 

Who are supposed to have blown up the 
Maine and how must a civilized people con- 
sider such an act? 

1 Quoted by Professor L. M. Salmon from an examination 
paper. 



184 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

Where is Ohio and how is it bounded ? 

5. Ask questions with correct emphasis and 
inflection; as, 

Will you ride with me? 
Will ^ou ride with 77ie ^ 
Will you ride with me? 
Will you ride with me ? etc., etc. 

6. Avoid the obscurity caused by auxiliary 
clauses or confusing parenthetical expressions; 
as, 

Do you think that it is expedient, taking 
into consideration the character of the popula- 
tion, which as you know has a strong admix- 
ture of Spanish blood and might not be well 
adapted to the degree of self-government 
implied in statehood, for the territories of New 
Mexico and Arizona to be admitted to the Union 
as states, especially as these regions lie largely 
in the arid section of our country (you have 
perhaps read how remote and desolate these 
deserts are except as they are reached by rail- 
roads, and watered by artesian wells or by 
water brought in long irrigating ditches from 
mountain streams, which soon lose themselves 
in the sands of the plains; doubtless you have 



THE ART OF QUESTIONING 185 

also heard of artesian wells, which are made 
by drilling straight down into the earth for 
many hundreds of feet, only to find in some cases 
that the water is so strongly impregnated by min- 
erals as to be unfit for use) ? John may answer. 

Remark. — Some teachers express their ideas in psy- 
chological rather than in logical order, running on until 
out of breath and allowing one idea to suggest the next 
without regard to its bearing upon the matter in hand. 
An error akin to this fault is the habit of making super- 
fluous remarks, hoping thereby to add vivacity to the 
recitation ; as, I want to see now who of this fine class, on 
this bright morning, can tell me what Mr. Lincoln, after 
much thought and not a little earnest prayer, and at the 
solicitation of many good citizens, did* when the whole 
country M^as electrified and then thrown into profound 
grief by the battle of Antietam. What bright boy or 
girl is ready with an answer that will show that he or 
she understands the history of our country ? 

7. Avoid the obscurity caused by verbs of 
indefinite meaning, such as, have^ do^ is, 
happens; as, 

"^ What do soldiers have when they go to 
battle? Ans. Guns, clothing, food, officers, 
commands, anxiety, fortitude, etc. 

What does glass do when it is heated? 
Bends, softens, expands, melts. 



186 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

What is the rat? A rodent, a mammal, 
a thief, an animal, a pest. 

What happens when it rains? Thunders, 
grows dark, water flows, rivers rise, etc. 

Remark. — An indefinite question calls for and de- 
serves an indefinite answer. 

8. Words that together make up one con- 
ception should not be divided between question 
and answer ; as, 

What did he suffer? Ans. Death. 
What did the man take ? Ans. His departure. 
How did the man lie? Ans. Dead. 
In what did the eyes of the audience swim ? 
Ans. Tears. 

What did they roar with? Ans. Laughter. 
What did the child burst into ? Ans. Tears. 

9. Avoid the "pumping" question, which 
is still worse ; as, 

Abraham was a ? Ans. Shepherd. 

Wrong. He was a patri ? Ans. Patri- 
arch. 

This word is a sub ? Ans. Subject. 

No. It is a substan — ? Ans. Substantive. 

10. The question must be in correct logical 



THE ART OF QUESTIONING 187 

form. Several cases may be distinguislied, as 
follows : — 

(1) If a particular is sought the immediate 
universal should appear in the question; as, 

From what metal (immediate universal) are 
ten-dollar pieces minted? Ans. From gold 
(a particular). 

From what material are bricks made? Ans. 
From clay. 

(2) Avoid too great universality; as, 
Where is Buffalo? Ans. In New York, on 

Lake Erie, at the western terminus of the Erie 
Canal, in the United States, etc. The correct 
form would be, In what state is Buffalo ? On 
what lake ? In what country ? At the western 
terminus of what canal ? etc. 

(3) Avoid vague questions; as. 

What kind of a man was Napoleon Bonaparte ? 
How was the battle of the Wilderness 
fought ? 

How does the dandelion grow? 

Remark. — The matter is not mended by putting such 
questions in the form of a command ; as, Tell all you 
can about Napoleon, the battle of the Wilderness, the 
dandelion. 



188 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

(4) Avoid questions calling for modality 
in general when each case is conditioned 
by the point of view; as (in the Sunday 
School), 

How shall we view the forgiveness of sins? 
Ans. As possible, probable, doubtful, needful, 
predestined, certain, as dependent upon con- 
trition, upon better life, etc. 

Remark. — The correct form will turn the mind tow- 
ard the answer desired; as, The forgiveness of sins is 
possible — Why ? Why does the forgiveness of sins de- 
pend upon contrition ? 

(5) A question should not be so framed as 
to call for both cause and effect (ground and 
consequence) ; as. 

Why are criminals punished ? Ans. Because 
of unlawful deeds, to reform them, to protect 
society. 

The better way is to call for ground and 
consequence in separate question ; as. 

On what grounds are criminals punished? 
Ans. Because of unlawful deeds. 

For what purpose are criminals punished? 
Ans. Reformation in themselves; warning to 
others. 



THE ART OF QUESTIONING 189 

(6) When particular characteristics are 
called for, the question must contain both 
genus and kind; as, 

What sort of a dwelling (^) is injurious to 
health Qc) ? Ans. A damp (c) dwelling. 

What kind of an apple (^) sets the teeth 
on edge (A;)? Ans, A sour (c) apple. 

(7) When the compass of a notion is asked 
for, the ground of the classification must be 
stated in the question; as. 

What classes of heavenly bodies are there, 
(a) with respect to light? 
(5) with respect to motion? 
(c) with respect to magnitude? 

(8) One should be sparing of questions ask- 
ing for definitions (except perhaps in exami- 
nations). If definitions are desired, it is better 
with the younger pupils to state class and 
differentia in the question; as. 

What is the name of the science that ex- 
plains the laws of thought? Ans. Logic. 

Remark. — Correct definitions are hard to formulate, 
and for children they have small didactic nse, except 
so far as they are inductively developed and deductively 
applied. 



190 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

11. Avoid a careless or weak use of verbs 
in questions. It is by means of the verb that 
we ask a question, for the verb is the bearer of 
the thought, the controller of the construction. 
Nothing can be asked by means of the other parts 
of speech. Several cautions may be given : — 

(1) As before indicated, avoid the use of 
such colorless verbs as he^ have^ hecome^ happen^ 
and especially do; as, 

What was he? What did he have? What 
did the boy become? What happened then? 
What did he do? Such questions can only 
relate to memorized matter; they have no de- 
veloping power. For example. What does a 
man do when he is sick? Ans. Goes to bed, 
sends for a physician, stops work, suffers, com- 
plains, makes his will, repents of his evil deeds, 
fears death, ceases to earn money, etc. 

(2) A question otherwise indefinite may be 
made definite by reference to some attendant 
circumstance; as. 

What happened on the third of July, 1863? 
on the fourth of July of the same year ? What 
occurs to the mercury of a thermometer in 
falling temperature? 



THE ART OF QUESTIONING 191 

(3) Colorless verbs may be strengthened by 
tlie addition of auxiliary clauses containing 
strong verbs; as, 

What does the nightingale do that is pleas- 
ing to us ? Ans. She sings. Better, By what 
means does the nightingale give us pleasure? 
Ans. By her song. 

What did Judas do because of his greed? 
Ans. He betrayed his Lord. Better, To what 
did greed impel Judas? 

Remark. — It is usually better to avoid both colorless 
verb and subordinate clause by using the strong verb 
in a simple clause ; as, What is the earth, if we have 
regard to its form? Ans. A sphere. Better, What is 
the form of the earth? 

In general we may say that every question 
should tend to strengthen the pupil's mental 
power by inciting him to think; it should fix 
or extend his knowledge or increase his power 
of expression. Consequently the teacher should 
study to frame his question so as to stimulate 
clear, vigorous thinking; he should avoid all 
forms of question that tend to confusion by 
indefiniteness, or to mental laxity by their too 



192 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

great universality. All questions, likewise, 
should be avoided that fail to stimulate thought 
in that they reveal the answer expected. 

The analytical and the development questions 
are the most important and the most difficult. 
By the aid of the latter we endeavor to secure 
in the pupil a comprehension of generalizations 
in the form of conceptions, rules, and princi- 
ples, which are involved in the subject matter 
taught ; by means of analytical questions we re- 
solve these totals into their elements, in order 
to find characteristics and individual facts. It 
is important that questions should stand in 
orderly and logical relations, leaving no im- 
passable logical gaps. Questions should follow 
the causal order when it exists, so that one 
will follow naturally after, or out of, the other. 
It is well for the beginner occasionally to work 
out beforehand a set of development or ana- 
lytical questions, or to write out brief cate- 
chisms, taking care not to let diverting topics 
and episodes lead him off the main path. 

It is often important to make evident that 
which is contained only by implication to the 
pupil's knowledge, to bring to consciousness 



THE ART OF QUESTIONING 193 

that of which he is now unconscious, to cor- 
rect misconceptions, to illuminate the obscure. 
Analytical questions which effect these results 
will often accompany or follow those designed 
to develop the generalizations of knowledge. 
Both kinds of questions will be used in dis- 
cussions of lessons in literature, in foreign 
languages, in sciences, and in mathematics. 

No teacher can question successfully by rule. 
Facility comes only with intelligent practice, 
preceded by forethought and followed by re- 
flection. The first helps us to avoid errors; 
the latter helps us to correct them. In the 
course of time one who has a natural aptitude 
for teaching and who tests and corrects his 
own work by study and thought, will find that 
the art of questioning effectively has become 
well-nigh instinctive. Before this facility has 
been acquired, there is some danger of becom- 
ing pedantic. It is too much to demand a 
complete sentence for every answer, for what 
is good form in social intercourse is not bad 
form in the school room. If Socrates, the 
prince of questioners, may abbreviate question 
and answer, surely we, his humble successors. 



194 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

may do likewise. Such questions as, Why? 
How ? For what purpose ? To what end ? In 
what way ? are often in place, saving time and 
promoting mental activity. 

It is pedantry, also, to banish all questions 
that can be answered by yes or no. We need 
only to be sure that sufficient reason follows or 
sufficient experience or knowledge precedes the 
answer. In other words, the yes or no should 
not be a fortunate or an unfortunate guess. 

A few general rules may be helpful to the 
young teacher. They may be formulated as 
follows : — 

1. Questions should in general be directed 
to the class, then to an individual; or if in 
the development of a topic the question is 
directed to a given pupil, all should feel that 
they may have an opportunity to tell what they 
know or at least a responsibility to do so. In- 
attention begets listlessness and loss of interest. 

2. Pupils should be called by name, and 
not merely indicated by pointing, or by such 
expressions as " you " or " you there." 

3. Stereotyped order in calling upon the 
pupils should be avoided, for obvious reasons. 



THE ART OF QUESTIONING 195 

The weak and the lazy, moreover, need to be 
called upon most, but the able need and 
deserve to have frequent opportunity to re- 
cite. The abler pupils may be called upon to 
correct and to help. 

4. Questions should be asked in clear, audi- 
ble tones, but shrillness and undue loudness 
are to be avoided, since they are the index of 
artificiality, even if they do not indicate a 
lack of culture. 

5. Where the answer demands reflection, an 
adequate time should be granted. Unless the 
question is a mere call for information, it may 
be recast, if it does not meet with ready 
response. 

6. When questions are put for the sake of 
drill, or of recitation upon memorized matter, 
they should be asked with force and rapidity. 
Children are fond of stirring exercises, espe- 
cially in reciting the multiplication table or 
in making rapid computations or in drill upon 
inflections. 

The answer is the natural counterpart to 
the question. Each would be incomplete with- 



196 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

out the other. A good question deserves a 
good answer, although the art of securing 
good answers is not always practised. 

So far as vocal characteristics are concerned, 
the answer should be made in good, clear, 
audible tones, corresponding in tension to the 
state of the teacher's mind, never in a whisper 
or a flutter of vocalized breath. The 'school 
tone ' is as bad in the pupil as in the teacher, 
for it ruins the voice, deadens the thought, 
and impairs the development of character. 
Americans, especially of the North and East, 
are reputed to have the worst voices in the 
world; it is certain that they are often harsh, 
high, shrill, rasping, or nasal. Doubtless a 
capricious and trying climate has much to do 
in effecting these results; but not a little of 
the fault lies with the public school, where 
children are taught at high tension, often in 
chalk-laden and vitiated air. To make them- 
selves heard in large and often noisy rooms, 
the pupils are admonished to "speak up," 
until after a time a voice, naturally musical 
and low, is permanently pitched to produce 
loud, high, and monotonous tones. The North 



THE ART OF QUESTIONING 197 

has public schools, bad climate, and wretched 
voices ; the South has low, musical voices, 
mild climate, and public schools only one gen- 
eration old. It would involve rather a nice 
calculation to apportion causes adequately in 
the two cases, but one needs only to remem- 
ber one's own school days and to visit schools 
to convince one's self that bad use of the 
voice both by teacher and pupil is largely re- 
sponsible for our defective voices. 
Ju If teachers would learn how to use their own 
voices, making them low, strong, musical, and 
non-nasal, and then give systematic voice cul- 
ture to their pupils, our musical ability as a 
nation would be enhanced, and the joy of living 
be sensibly increased. We teach our pupils 
Latin and Greek in order to give them cul- 
ture. To some extent our efforts are success- 
ful; but culture of the voice, which manifests 
itself with every utterance, is more universal 
in its effects and more to be admired than 
the culture of the intellect. In daily inter- 
course, who would not prefer sweet, mellow 
tones of voice to all the learning that could be 
crammed into the mind ? Such a voice is 



198 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

nature's best gift, especially to women, and it 
is art's choicest achievement. Teachers should 
develop both the voice consciousness and the 
voice conscience, a keen sensibility to the 
ugly in tone, and a determination that is 
second nature to prevent it or to eradicate it 
vrhenever it appears. 

If, in asking questions which are designed 
to analyze or to develop a subject of thought, 
it is found that the pupils cannot answer 
readily, the teacher should scrutinize his ques- 
tion to find the cause of the failure. Of 
course, in calling for memorized matter, it may 
be assumed that the children do not know if 
they cannot answer; but a variety of causes 
may prevent ready response when the teacher 
seeks merely to unfold ideas. It may be that 
the class is timid, either because the surround- 
ings are new and strange, or because the 
teacher himself paralyzes their efforts. Again, 
the pupils may be inattentive because the 
teacher is prolix or uninteresting, or because 
the air is bad or their brains are fatigued ; 
or it is possible that they do not know the 
end the teacher is trying to reach, in which 



THE ART OF QUESTIONING 199 

case their minds are like sailboats without 
rudders. 

j^ Sometimes haste to answer causes errors. 
The young love to answer instantly, and this 
is no crime. In such cases the teacher may 
repeat the question, and await a better 
answer. If a pupil appears incorrigible in 
his rattle-brained answers, let him write them 
for a time upon the board or upon paper. 
This device secures the needed time for reflec- 
tion. Should the answer be so bad as to be 
laughable, it is best for the teacher not to join 
in the laugh unless there is something really 
funny about it, but to try to teach him a better 
way to reply. Impatience should not vent 
itself in ridicule or scorn. Only impertinence 
deserves such treatment. 

A topic equal in importance to the use and 
misuse of the voice is the development of, or 
the failure to develop, good English through 
the answers given by the pupils. With small 
children it is well to encourage in every way 
the habit of answering in full sentences, not of 
a stereotyped form, but such as will teach com- 
pleteness and continuity of thought. With 



200 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

older students the forms of good society are 
the most natural and effective. 

Sometimes the teacher becomes reconciled 
to receive mere fragmentary answers to ques- 
tions; as, 

Where do we find the arid regions of our 
country? Arts. West. 

By what means do the people supply water 
to the land? Ans. Irrigation and artesian 
wells. 

What caused the suffering at Valley Forge ? 
Ans. Lack of food and clothing. 

How old was Christ when for the first time 
he discoursed with the doctors in the temple ? 
Ans. Twelve. 

The ejection of detached words does not con- 
duce to a mastery of the English tongue. It 
is common for teachers to make minor or occa- 
sional corrections, without bringing about a 
regular connection between matter and form. 
It thus becomes possible for children to pass 
through our public schools without ever acquir- 
ing the power of connected and correct speech 
upon any subject. This incapacity is enhanced 
if the teacher never calls upon the child for 



THE AET OF QUESTIONING 201 

connected discourse, but relies upon questions 
that may be answered by very brief sentences 
or even by their detached fragments. Every 
child should have frequent incentives to answer 
in a group of well-articulated sentences. His 
training in the use of oral English should not 
depend upon training in subjects specifically 
denominated "English," but should extend to 
all subjects, mathematics, and science, not less 
than to language and literature. 

However important the method of question 
and answer may be, it should not blind us to 
the need of alternating catechism with other 
forms of instruction. Description, narration, 
and exposition are not to become insignificant 
because the value of the question is magnified. 
An interchange of these methods contributes 
to freshness and interest. When all the music 
is made on one string it is sure to become 
monotonous. 

When exposition has made a definite point, 
or has advanced a distinct step in the develop- 
ment of a subject, the question helps to reen- 
force what has been accomplished. It tends to 



202 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

clarify the pupil's knowledge, helping him to 
assimilate and to remember what he has par- 
tially learned, and it lays a firmer basis for 
further elucidation of the subject. It is not an 
uncommon error to present too great masses 
of new knowledge, without making sure that 
the pupil has comprehended what has been put 
before him. This is particularly true in mathe- 
matics and physics, where far-reaching prin- 
ciples are involved, and where the mastery 
of each step in turn is the condition of se- 
cure advance. Nothing equals the catechetical 
method for helping the student to grasp 
each principle, and to make sure that he is 
not dropping out elements essential for his 
future progress. 

There is much room for choice of method 
when there is partial knowledge present re- 
specting any principle of grammar, mathemat- 
ics, or science that is to be established. It 
should be understood that exposition takes less 
time than catechism, but at some sacrifice of 
the student's self-activity. If the teacher habit- 
ually does much and the student little, torpid- 
ity will soon become the ruling state of mind 



THE ART OF QUESTIONING 203 

for the pupil. On the other hand, catechism 
promotes self-activity, but it may easily sacrifice 
time. We need therefore to strike a just bal- 
ance, promoting self-activity, keeping interest 
alive, and yet making rapid and substantial 
progress. 

If catechism were our sole reliance, it would 
fail to cultivate the habit of continuous speech. 
For this reason we must not forget narration, 
while applying the mental whetstone by means 
of questions. In the interests of connected 
speech one should refrain from tripping the 
pupil with disconcerting questions. A race 
over obstacles may be diverting, but it does not 
conduce to steady advance. It is even better 
to permit the pupil to blunder through to the 
end of his recitation, than to interrupt him 
perpetually with questions calculated to ob- 
struct the current of his thought. Sometimes 
teachers are so impatient to obtain immediate 
results that they find it impossible to wait. 

A school considered by many as one of the 
best in the United States is that which was con- 
ducted by the late Charles L. Howard of St. 
Louis. Not a little of its excellence consists in 



204 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

the fact that the teachers have developed the 
power to wait for the pupil to do his thinking. 
A visitor one day, having passed through this 
school, expressed himself as well pleased with all 
he had seen excepting one room, where he said 
everything was "dead." It chanced that dur- 
ing his brief stay in that room nothing was 
said. The teacher stood silent looking at the 
pupil, and the pupil stood silent looking at 
the floor. To outward appearances nobody was 
doing anything. The principal invited the 
visitor to go with him again to the room in 
question. The same class was still reciting. 
After listening a few moments, the visitor dis- 
covered that the pupils were engaged in numer- 
ical computations so complex and so rapid that 
he had difficulty in keeping up with the pace 
set by the children. He came to the conclusion 
that, though death always means silence, silence 
does not always mean death. 



XV 

INTEREST AND THINKING 

In all cases of mediate interest, as we saw 
in Section IV, tlie end and the means for reach- 
ing it do not coincide in time. A series of 
intervening activities separates the self and 
the goal toward which the self strives. We 
have the precise counterpart of this condition 
when we seek to have our pupils think. 

To most readers of educational literature 
the admonition to make the pupil "think" 
brings to mind such words as analysis and 
synthesis^ induction and deduction^ or it suggests 
painful thoughts about the syllogism and the 
rules of logic. The matter, however, is not 
so serious, provided we divest our minds of 
the prevalent impression that thinking is the 
performance of some abstract process, pre- 
sumably of great virtue, but of whose precise 
nature we are somewhat uncertain. All school 
thinking, at least of elementary grade, is 

205 



206 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

nothing more than the solution of concrete 
problems, in which the problem is the end to 
be reached, and the process of the solution is 
nothing more than the series of activities inter- 
vening between the self and the end desired. 
As soon as school work assumes the form of 
problems to be solved by the self-activity of 
the pupils, we have at once a concrete appli- 
cation of the doctrine of interest, provided, 
of course, that we can make the end seem to 
the pupil worth striving for, and can render 
it natural for the interest to cling to the steps 
of the solution as well as to the attainment of 
the end. But it is to this form of work that 
children most readily respond. If supplied 
with suitable books of reference, what could 
be more delightful for members of the history 
class than to study out answers to such ques- 
tions as the following: How did the colonists 
construct their first dwellings ? Had they 
nails? locks? door-knobs? hinges? window 
glass? bricks? shingles? How may the beds 
have been constructed? the tables? the 
chairs ? Of what were the spoons made ? 
the plates ? Were the colonists supplied with 



INTEREST AND THINKING 207 

stoves? matches? canned vegetables or fruits? 
How did they manage to get on without 
these useful articles? What kind of ploughs 
and other farm implements had the colonists? 
How did they cut and thresh their wheat and 
rye ? What facilities had they for travel, such 
as roads and vehicles ? Compare the guns of 
the colonial period with those of the present. 
What pleasures had these people that we per- 
haps lack? What hardships did they suffer that 
we do not have to endure? Compare the 
purposes of the English explorers with those 
of the French ; the Spanish. Contrast the 
French settlements with those of the English. 
Why should the Indians often look with more 
favor upon the French settler than upon the 
English? 

Teachers need not be dismayed at the 
thought of setting such problems before their 
pupils because of lack of books. In the first 
place, it is not so hard to get books as it 
once was. In many places state or city 
libraries are placed at the disposition of the 
schools. In New York and other states books 
are sent upon request from the state library, 



208 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

and may be kept for considerable periods of 
time. Home libraries often contain useful 
books which the children may consult, or the 
school library may possess unexpected facilities 
for investigation ; or, provided none of these 
sources are available, the few books the teacher 
has, supplemented by her knowledge and re- 
sourcefulness, will enable any history class to 
take advantage of the method" of the problem. 
Even if there is but one text-book to be had, 
and that a mere skeleton of history, the teacher 
may set problems daily which may be solved by 
mother wit, supplemented by home experience. 
Most men of the age of fifty know from per- 
sonal experience much concerning life under 
primitive conditions. 

Every time a pupil works out a problem, no 
matter how simple and concrete, he performs 
a genuine exercise in thinking, and, what is 
still more important, he conforms to the con- 
ditions of normal, healthy interest. It is the 
bane of much of our school work that it is 
prepared for unthinking mass absorption. It 
is adjusted to uniform consumption with just 
so much each day, each term. The pupil can 



INTEREST AND THINKING 209 

only memorize and recite. He has no oppor- 
tunity, not to say incentive, to work things 
out in accordance with his own initiative, and 
by his own ingenuity. Thinking is, however, 
a vital element in genuine interest, since it 
contains the idea of an end to be reached by 
a series of activities. 

It is unfortunate for the school that current 
misconception attaches the idea of thinking 
almost entirely to the enforced activity of the 
will. ' Voluntary ' attention is thought to 
be the result of unpleasant effort, the dead 
strain of determination. Even Professor Ribot 
appears, from the following, to hold this errone- 
ous opinion : ^ — 

"Voluntary or artificial attention is a product 
of art, of education, of direction, and of train- 
ing. It is grafted, as it were, upon spontaneous 
or natural attention, and finds in the latter 
its condition of existence, as the graft does 
in the stalk into which it has been inserted. 
In spontaneous attention the object acts by its 
intrinsic power; in voluntary attention the sub- 
ject acts through extrinsic, that is, through 
1 " The Psycliology of Attention," p. 35. 



210 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

superadded powers. In voluntary attention the 
aim is no longer set by hazard or circumstances ; 
it is willed, chosen, accepted, or, at least, sub- 
mitted to ; it is mainly a question of adapting 
ourselves to it, and of finding the proper means 
for maintaining the state ; and hence, voluntary 
attention is always accompanied by a certain 
feeling of effort. The maximum of spontaneous 
attention and the maximum of voluntary attention 
are totally antithetic : the one running in the 
direction of the strongest attraction^ and the 
other in the direction of the greatest resistance. 
They constitute the two polar limits between 
which all possible degrees are found, with a 
definite point at which, in theory at least, the 
two forms meet." 

The lines in italics express the common 
idea ; namely, that interest has alone to do 
with the mental state arising from the con- 
stantly renewed stimulus that sustains invol- 
untary or spontaneous attention; and that 
thought, which comes from voluntary atten- 
tion, is something foreign to interest. A 
careful reading of Dr. Dewey's theory of 
interest should convince one that the com- 



INTEREST AND THINKING 211 

mon view is an erroneous one, and that 
interest is never so potent as when it is 
associated with will-impelled thought. In- 
terest, voluntary attention, and thinking are 
synonymous terms, to the extent that they 
belong together, presupposing and supple- 
menting one another in the solution of 
concrete thought problems. It is only the 
pressure of mass instruction that has con- 
cealed from us this intimate and important 
identity between interest and voluntarily 
directed attention to the solution of self- 
selected, or at all events self-welcomed, 
problems. It is the memorizing of ready- 
made answers, required or anticipated, that 
dulls the thought powers of the child. The 
story is told of a little girl who was memo- 
rizing the answers to a set of geography 
questions, among which was the following 
question accompanied by its answer : Do the 
stars shine by day as well as by night ? Ans. 
They do. She sat with her head in her hands, 
swaying to and fro and repeating the answer: 
They do, they do, they do — they do, they do, 
they do. Though doubtless an exaggeration, 



212 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

this incident shows how memorizing may 
inhibit thinking. 

Nothing could be more useful to teachers 
desiring to utilize and develop the thought 
powers of the children under their charge 
than the study of the processes whereby 
scientists have found adequate explanations 
of facts and events that had long puzzled 
their predecessors. The explanation of so 
familiar a thing as fire baffled many a gen- 
eration of thinkers. For a long time many 
philosophers had to content themselves with 
an explanation that did not explain. They 
fancied that a subtile, intangible, and un- 
known principle named phlogiston exists in 
combustible materials and is the cause of fire. 
So evident, however, is the fact that the 
attempt to explain the known by means of 
the unknown is a mere self-deception, that 
earnest thinkers never pause until they find 
the true cause, as they did in the case of 
fire. Again, it is well known that for 
fifteen hundred years alchemists and chemists 
sought a means whereby the base metals might 
be transmuted into gold. The persistence of 



INTEREST AND THINKING 213 

this effort was due to a defective atomic 
theory left us by Democritus and other 
ancient philosophers. They conceived that 
all atoms are qualitatively alike, and that 
bodies differ, therefore, only in the arrange- 
ment of their atoms. Were this true, there 
would be no absurdity in seeking so to 
rearrange the atoms of iron that they would 
form gold. 

The point to be observed in these and all 
other efforts to find true explanations is that 
there is a distinct problem to be solved, a dis- 
tant goal to be reached, and that the interest 
in the end is always carried back into the 
experiments and researches deemed necessary 
to reach the solution. The great outside 
macrocosm of science becomes the prototype 
and guiding ideal for the microcosm of the 
individual mind. By this it must not be 
inferred that the school is to become a 
mere after-image of the world of science, 
where mere shadow or imitation discoveries 
are to be made, and in which the discovery 
is only a pale repetition of what has already 
been accomplished. The school may, however, 



214 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

borrow something of the method of science, 
may enjoy the same kind of motives, in that 
the pupil, like the scientist, has a problem, 
requiring the adaptation of means to end, and 
capable of arousing the most earnest effort, 
not to say enthusiasm. 

Among the many problems that attracted 
the early attention of thinkers, and whose 
solution is suggestive to teachers, was the 
phenomenon of dew. It was a matter of 
universal experience, yet nobody seemed able 
to give a satisfactory explanation of it. The 
most remarkable thing about it is that there 
are men still living who were born before 
it was thoroughly understood. The Romans 
fancied, that since dew falls only on clear 
nights, it must be some sort of emanation 
from the distant heavens, possibly of the 
stars ; and the Roman ladies, sharing this 
belief, used to bathe their faces in dew to 
improve their complexions. They seemed to 
imagine that something of the celestial ra- 
diance belonging to those remote spheres 
from which they thought the dew emanated 
would be imparted to their own countenances. 



INTEREST AND THINKING 215 

The true theory of the cause of dew was 
first set forth in complete form by William 
Charles Wells of London, in 1814. Since that 
time, at least three important writers, namely, 
Sir John Herschel, John Stuart Mill, and Alex- 
ander Bain, have used the history of the dis- 
covery of the cause of dew to illustrate the 
processes of thought. 

The stages in the scientific aspects of this 
investigation are substantially as follows: — 

1. It must first be clearly understood just 
what the problem is, namely, the explanation 
of the cause of the moisture that gathers 
upon objects at night, and which is. not due 
to rain, fog, mist, or snow. This moisture 
is deposited when there is none visible in the 
sky, that is, on clear nights. An effect is 
given, therefore, whose cause it is our prob- 
lem to discover. 

2. The first thing that is done in nearly all 
efforts at discovery is to examine the attend- 
ant circumstances to see if thereby some rea- 
sonable explanation is not suggested. Two 
such circumstances at once occur to us : dew 
falls at night, and it also falls in that part of 



216 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

the twenty-four hours when it is coldest. 
Two possible causes are therefore suggested, 
darkness and cold. The first of these we may 
at once eliminate, because on the darkest 
nights, when the sky is covered by clouds, 
dew does not usually fall; furthermore, there 
is no apparent likeness between moisture and 
the absence of light. Let us therefore exam- 
ine the other attendant circumstance to see 
if a cause is not thereby suggested. 

3. Several analogies at once occur to us. 
Moisture gathers when we breathe on cold glass 
or metal, or when we pour cold water into a 
glass or pitcher on a hot day, or in a hot 
room. It also gathers upon the window-panes 
of crowded rooms when the outside tempera- 
ture is cold, and upon walls of outer passages 
when a moist thaw succeeds frost. 

4. Let us therefore try cooling down vari- 
ous surfaces under varying conditions. Lay a 
thermometer on dewy grass at night, and 
hang another in the air at some distance 
above the ground. This experiment we may 
repeat on many successive nights. We find 
that it is always cooler on the grass than it is 



INTEREST AND THINKING 217 

above it. It naturally occurs to us to try the 
same experiment on nights when there is no 
dew. Here we encounter a difficulty, for the 
grass may still be cooler than the air above 
it, and yet there be no dew. Evidently there 
is something more than the mere difference 
in temperature to be taken into consideration. 

5. It is a matter of common observation 
that dew gathers on some objects but does 
not upon others. Can it be that the materi- 
als themselves have anything to do with the 
phenomenon? Let us try various objects, 
such as metals, glass, stone, wood, cloth, wool, 
cotton, etc., with this question before us : Does 
the temperature of objects vary with the 
amount of dew they gather? 

6. At this point the inquirer is aided by 
the researches of Sir John Leslie upon the 
law of the radiation of heat, which is as fol- 
lows : The rate of becoming dewed varies 
with the conducting power of the substance. 
That is, objects that are good conductors of 
heat do not readily become dewed, while 
objects that are poor conductors gather dew 
in proportion to their badness as conductors. 



218 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

7. Let us further inquire to what extent 
the character of the surface operates, the sub- 
stance remaining the same. Leslie found that 
rough surfaces gather dew more rapidly than 
smooth ones, because they radiate internal 
heat more readily. In the meantime another 
set of experiments may be made upon tex- 
ture, as seen in metals, stone, wood, velvet, 
eiderdown, cotton, etc. We find that com- 
pact bodies are but little dewed, whereas loose 
textures have much dew. Now, as regards 
Jieat^ we find that loose bodies are bad con- 
ductors. They resist the passage of heat, and 
hence are suitable as clothing. 

8. Gathering up the results of these experi- 
ments, we find that surfaces are cooled by a 
cool contact, but that, if the surface is sup- 
plied with heat from within, there can be no 
permanent cooling of the outside until the in- 
ternal heat is exhausted. Furthermore, good 
radiation brings about surface cooling, but bad 
radiation, as in the case of polished metals, 
means the retention of surface heat. We 
come therefore to the conclusion that the 
thermometer would show, namely, that sur- 



INTEREST AND THINKING 219 

faces gather dew as they fall in temperature. 
We seem, therefore, at this stage to have 
found an invariable connection between dew 
and temperature. 

9. Yet we meet a serious obstacle in the 
fact that the same fall of temperature does 
not always bring dew, since there are cool 
nights w^ien none falls. It would be difficult, 
therefore, to establish the cause of dew by 
temperature experiments alone. As a matter 
of historic fact, the explanation was finally 
cleared up through the aid furnished in 
another department of science. 

10. In 1799 Dalton published his theory 
of aqueous vapor, or atmosphere of steam, 
which was the missing link in the dew prob- 
lem. He found that the vapor in the atmos- 
phere varies according to circumstances, and 
that the amount the atmosphere is capable of 
holding depends upon temperature, to each 
degree of which a certain amount corresponds. 
An amount equal to one inch of mercury is 
sustained at 80°, half an inch at 59°. When 
the air has as much moisture as it is capable 
of containing it is said to be saturated. Then, 



220 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

supposing the air to be saturated at any mo- 
ment, a fall in temperature will lead to pre- 
cipitation as visible moisture, but since the 
air is not always saturated, not every fall in 
temperature will bring dew or mist. The 
point of saturation is therefore called the dew- 
point. 

11. These experiments upon temperature, 
when combined with this application of the 
law of aqueous humor in the atmosphere, 
completely explained the cause of dew, one of 
the puzzles of the centuries. It became pos- 
sible to explain many attendant influences, 
like those of clouds, trees, intervening surfaces, 
and the like. 

It is now possible for any teacher to make any 
child intelligent upon this subject, of which 
the greatest scientists were once unable to give 
a satisfactory account; but the educational 
value of this revelation to the pupil depends 
upon the manner in which it is made. 

The first and worst method might be to pre- 
sent the subject after the manner of the diction- 
ary ; that is, by definition. For example : — 

1. Webster : " Moisture from the atmosphere 



INTEREST AND THINKING 221 

condensed by cool bodies upon their surfaces, 
particularly at night." 

2. The Standard : " Moisture condensed from 
the atmosphere and gathered in small drops 
upon the upper surfaces of plants and other 
bodies which radiate heat well, but conduct it 
badly ; once supposed to fall like rain and still 
so spoken of ; as, a heavy dew fell." 

3. The Century : " The aqueous vapor which 
is deposited from the atmosphere by condensa- 
tion, especially during the night, in the form of 
small drops on the surface of bodies. The 
formation of dew is explained by the loss of 
heat by bodies on the earth's surface through 
radiation at night, by which means they and the 
air immediately about them are cooled below the 
dew-point (which see). Dew is thus deposited 
on bodies which are good radiators and poor 
conductors of heat, like grass; hence also, it 
appears^ chiefly on calm and clear nights — that 
is, when the conditions are most favorable for 
radiation." 

The obvious defect of such a method of 
presentation is that, even if there is intellectual 
comprehension of the cause of the dew, there 



222 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

is, however, no thinking of the kind spoken of 
in this section ; since the mind formulates no 
problem for solution, makes no experiments, 
and takes no steps to demonstrate or to verify 
the truth of the proposition. On the contrary, 
the usual result is that the pupil tries to hold 
both fact and exposition by force of memory. 
At best, nothing more than clear ideas are 
obtained by such a method. The zest that 
comes from thought in solving self-set or self- 
accepted problems in the determination of 
the principles underlying cooling by radia- 
tion and the varying capacity of the atmos- 
phere to hold water-vapor with change in 
temperatures is wholly lost. In other words, 
if we would have vividness, interest, and the 
verve that accompanies them, we must let the 
pupil live into the subject by that species of 
thought which involves problem and solution. 
A distinction must be made between problem- 
setting in the grades, and problem-setting in 
the high school, because the leading purposes 
of the two stages differ. In elementary science 
work in general, our chief aim is not so much 
to master the principles underlying a wide 



INTEREST AND THINKING 223 

range of phenomena, as it is to utilize the 
scientific knowledge possessed by the teacher 
in the explanation of particular facts and events. 
This problem of the dew is a section of a much 
wider body of knowledge concerning water and 
its forms. In the high school we should want 
the student to understand this fact, and to use 
the study of dew as one illustration of the laws 
that govern evaporation and condensation of 
water, and conduction and radiation of heat. 
In other words, the high school student has 
the mastery of principle, law as such, for his 
problem, whereas the elementary pupil has for 
his objective point the explanation of given 
individual facts. In the latter case, the teacher 
will suggest the problem, How shall we find 
out the cause of dew? He will have the 
children try easy and striking experiments in 
evaporation and condensation, and will make 
such observations as are practicable concerning 
the conduction and radiation of heat. Cloth, 
cotton, wool, and other objects may be put out 
at night, and the relative amount of dew 
noticed in the morning. The efforts of the 
children to find elementary facts concerning 



224 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

water and heat will serve as a basis for their 
lively apprehension of the more difficult points 
that the teacher must explain. So far as they 
are able, and so far as the circumstances permit, 
the children will thus make their contribution 
to the thought necessary to good understanding 
of the matter in hand. 

With the high school student, therefore, law 
is the end to be reached, while the specific 
facts and events are the instruments whereby 
he is able to solve his problems by his own 
thought; with the elementary school student, 
on the other hand, the explanation of the spe- 
cific fact or event is the end for which he works, 
while the principles of nature are the means 
whereby the teacher helps him to solve his 
problem, mostly by his own thinking. This 
difference between the purpose of nature work 
in the grades and science in the high school is 
a constant. It holds with almost equal validity, 
not only in all nature study, but also in the 
study of all other subjects. 

Problem-setting for and by the pupils, and 
self-incited thought in reaching the solution, 
should permeate every department of school 



INTEREST AND THINKING 225 

work. It is fairly common already in number 
work, for this naturally assumes the form of 
problem and solution. Even mechanical and 
perfunctory solution is better than none. But 
where the pupil can feel that the problem is 
genuine and vital, not merely conventional, 
he works at it with the zest that belongs to 
all things that are thoroughly alive. 

There are two problems that constantly 
recur in oral reading. They are: 1. What is 
the thought? 2. How can it be so expressed 
as to convey the real meaning to others? A 
grammar school reading class can be trained 
to lightning-like rapidity in the perception 
of meaning involved in a given rendering. If 
the meaning suggested by the reading of one 
pupil differs from their own conception, the 
other pupils are eager to show, by reading, just 
what their notion of the text is. When 
opportunity is given for such ex]3ression of 
thought, each member of the class is kept 
keenly alert to detect both misconceptions 
and new insights by the other members. 
The whole class might agree as to the calling 
of the words of a paragraph, and yet no two 



226 INTEREST AND EDUCATION 

agree that the true meaning has been ex- 
pressed by any particular reader. The writer 
listened, not long since, to an actor as he 
recited the lines of the banished king in 
"As You Like It." The man had maturity, 
good form and face, and a voice full of deep, 
mellow music ; but alas ! he was unable to 
convey accurately the simple ideas of that 
part. A well-drilled child of twelve could 
have corrected him upon almost every line. 
The most obvious meanings were obscured or 
entirely perverted by this actor, who had 
never learned how to distinguish shades of 
meaning by shades of emphasis and inflection. 
Problem-setting and problem-solving of the 
kinds here described are fascinating alike to 
teacher and pupil, for each feels that he is 
dealing with a real not a simulated situation, 
and the mental powers are all healthfully 
excited. When children's minds are thus 
active, one may almost see and feel them 
grow. 



INDEX 



Abstractions, 141. 

Esthetic impulses, 126. 

Alchemy, 141. 

Allurement vs. effort, 22, 

Alternation of catechism and 
other methods, 201. 

Alternation of effort and apa- 
thy, 25. 

Analytical questions, 180, 192. 

Answers, fragmentary, 200. 

Answer, the, 195. 

Antietam, 185. 

Artisans, educational, 132. 

Artists, educational, 133. 

Art of exposition, the, 165. 

Art of questioning, 179. 

Art, teaching a fine, 130, 

" As You Like It," 226. 

Atomic theory of Democritus, 
213. 

Attention and interest, 209. 

Bain, Alexander, 215. 
Beman and Smith, 146. 
Bhaskara, 173. 
Books for history, 207. 
* Born ' teachers, 132. 
Bumpo, Natty, 43. 
Burroughs, John, quoted, 167. 

Caribou, curiosity of, 122. 
Castes, 8. 

Catechism, alternation with 
. other methods, 201. 
Causes of routine school work,' 
99. 



Century Dictionary, quoted, 

221. 
Chemistry, 144. 
Choice of method, 202. 
City children, 94. 
Clear ideas and vivid ideas, 

44. 
Cocksureness, 139. 
Colorless verbs, 190. 
Committee of Ten, quoted, 

67, 
Concrete ideas, 145, 
Concreteness in instruction, 

141, 
"Critique of Pure Reason," 

137. 
Curiosity, 121. 

Dalton, 219. 
Dandelion, 187. 
Davidson, 14. 
Democritus, 213. 
Demonstration, Euclidian, 173, 

175. 
Description vs. narration, 159. 
Desire and effort, 36. 
Desire and interest, 42. 
Desire and pleasure, 41. 
Desire, nature of, 37. 
Developmentquestions.lSO, 192. 
Dewey, Dr. John, quoted, 19, 

43, 
Dew-point, 220, 
Dew, the problem of, 214. 
IHagogic culture, 74. 
Dialogue vs. monologue, 152. 



227 



228 



INDEX 



Dictation, 156. 
Divided attention, 25, 26. 
Double questions, 183. 
Drill, 101. 
Drudgery, 7. 
Drudgery and work, 32. 

Economic sciences, the, 62. 

Educational artisans, 132. 

Educational artists, 133. 

Educational geniuses, 132. 

Education, interest and sur- 
vival, 72; universalizing of, 
50. 

Effort and desire, 36. 

Effort vs. allurement, 22. 

Elective schools, 53. 

Elective studies, interest and, 
44. 

Elements in instruction, per- 
sonal, 134. 

Engineers, 52. 

English, development of, 199. 

Envy, definition of, 169. 

Erasmus, 50. 

Error in effort theory, 24. 

Eskimos, 3. 

European plan of elective 
schools, 53. 

Examination questions, 180. 

Exposition, art of, 165 ; verbal, 
170; of thought, 171. 

Extension of knowledge, 50. 

Farm training, 93. 

Feeling of worth, interest a, 

28. 
Figurative expressions, 182. 
Fogginess of vision, 142. 
Foreign words, 182. 
Fragmentary answers, 200. 
Franco-Prussian War, 183. 
Freedom of the teacher, 131. 

Geniuses, educational, 132. 



Genus and kind in questions, 

189. 
Greek heroes, 150. 
Greek ideas, 49. 
Ground and consequence in 

questions, 188. 
Ground of classification, 189. 

Hall, Dr. G. Stanley, quoted, 

13, 111. 
Hamelin Town, 136. 
" Hayne, Reply to," 138. 
Herschel, Sir John, 215. 
History, books for, 207. 
"Homer in Chios," 150. 
Howard, Charles L., 203. 
How interest arises, 1. 
Hubbard, Mr. Elbert, quoted, 

91. 
Human sciences, 62. 
Huxley, quoted, 139. 

Ideas, clear and vivid, 44. 
Immediate vs. mediate interest, 

29. 
Impulse, 21. 
Impulses, aesthetic, 126. 
Indian, the American, 11. 
Induction, principle of, in 

study, 56. 
Indulgence, selfish, 40. 
Industries, differentiation of, 

50. 
Inhibition of thinking, 212. 
Insight, 118. 
Instruction, personal elements 

in, 134. 
Intellectual-motor side of mind, 

87. 
Interest and thinking, 205. 
Interest and voluntary atten- 
tion, 209. 
Interest, how it arises, 1. 
Interest, subjective side of, 

28. 



INDEX 



229 



James, Professor William, 

quoted, 15, 16, 113. 
*' Jungle Books," 157. 

Kant, 137. 

Knowledge, extension of, 50. 

" Laocoon," 159. 
Leather-stocking Tales, 43. 
Leslie, Sir John, 217. 
Lessing's "Laocoon," 159. 
Lincoln, 185. 

Linguistic instruction, objec- 
tivity in, 148. 
Literature, teaching of, 167. 
Logical form of questions, 187. 
Lombroso, 77. 

Long, William J., quoted, 122. 
Lord Kelvin, quoted, 48. 
Lotze, 142. 

Maine, the, 183. 

Manual training, 110. 

Mass instruction, 131. 

Mediate vs. immediate interest, 
29. 

Method permeated by person- 
ality, 133. 

Methods of teaching, 117. 

Mill, John Stuart, 215. 

Modality in questions, 188. 

Modern city child, the, 85. 

Monologue vs. dialogue, 152. 

Mosaic, 172. 

Motor training, 85. 

Narration, 156. 
Natty Bumpo, 43. 
Natural sciences, the, 62. 
Nature of desire, 37. 
Nature ' work vs. science, 58, 
222. 

Objectivity in linguistic in- 
struction, 148. 



Object of interest, the, 20. 
Olympian gods, 150. 
Olympic games, 148. 
Oral presentation, 150. 

"Paper Foldings, Row's Geo- 
metric Exercises in," 14(3. 

Paralytics, academic and diges- 
tive, 75. 

Pathological methods, 127. 

Patten, Professor, quoted, 5. 

Peary, 2. 

Pedantry, 193. 

Personal elements in instruc- 
tion, 134. 

Personality governed by 
method, 133. 

Philistine, The, 91. 

Play and work for city chil- 
dren, 103. 

Play in the city, 96. 

Pleasure and desire, 41. 

Presentation, oral, 150. 

Primitive men, 1. 

Problem of the dew, 214. 

Problem setting and problem 
solving, 206. 

Pythagoras, 173. 

Questioning, art of, 179. 

Questions, classes of, 180. 

Questions determining method, 
128. 

Questions, specific characteris- 
tics of, 182. 

Reading and problem setting, 

225. 
Relation of interest to methods 

of teaching, 116. 
Relation of the teacher to his 

methods, 127. 
" Reply to Hay ne," 138. 
Review questions, 180. 
Ribot, error of, 209. 



230 



INDEX 



"Road to hell, the," 141. 
Routine school work, causes of, 

99. 
"Row's Geometric Exercises in 

Paper Folding," 146. 
Rules for questioning, 194. 

Salmon, Professor L. M., 183. 

Saturation, 219. 

" School tone," 135, 196. 

Science and thinking, 212. 

Sciences, human, natural, and 
economic, 62. 

Sciences, the human, 62. 

Science vs. nature work, 58, 
223. 

Self-expression, 12. 

Selfish indulgence, 40. 

Sensory -intellectual side of 
mind, 87. 

Seton-Thompson, 157. 

Smith, Beman and, 146. 

"Snowbound," 147. 

Snyder, Denton J., quoted, 150. 

Special characteristics of ques- 
tions, 182. 

Speech of the teacher, 135. 

Speer method, 146. 

Socrates, 154. 

Sophists, 153. 

Standard Dictionary, quoted, 
221. 

St. Louis, 203. 

Studies, elective, 44. 

Sturm, John, 60. 

Subjective side of interest, 28. 

Survival, education, interest 
and, 72. 

TalbS, Leather-stocking, 34. 
Teaching a fine art, 130. 



Teaching, relation of interest 
and methods of, 116. 

Teaching vs. telling, 153. 

Tediousness, 131. 

Telling vs. teaching, 153. 

Ternpo, 137. 

Tension, 139. 

Thinking, interest and, 205. 

Thurston, Professor, quoted, 
69. 

" Tom Brown's School," 
quoted, 104. 

Tone, 137. 

Town, Hamelin, 136. 

Translation, 149. 

Valjean, Jean, 117. 
Verbs, weak, 190. 
Vision, fogginess of, 142. 
Vivid ideas and clear ideas, 

44. 
Voice, the, 135, 197. 

Ward, Lester F., quoted, 81. 

Weak verbs, 190. 

Webster's Dictionary, quoted, 
220. 

"Webster's Reply to Hayne," 
138. 

Wells, William Charles, 215. 

Whittier, quoted, 147. 

Why, the question, 125. 

Wilderness, battle of, 187. 

Winkelmann, 162. 

Women teachers, 99. 

Work and drudgery, 32. 

Work and play for city chil- 
dren, 103. 

World conundrums, 182. 

Worth, interest a feeling of, 
28. 






HERBART'S 

OUTLINES OF EDUCATIONAL 
DOCTRINE 

TRANSLATED BY 

ALEXIS F. LANGE, Ph.D. 

Associate Professor of English and Scandinavian Philology and Dean 
of the Faculty of the College of Letters, University of California 

ANNOTATED BY 

CHARLES DE QARMO, Ph.D. 

Professor of the Science and Art of Education, Cornell University 

Cloth i2mo $1.25 net 

" It is a thoroughly twentieth century American book. It is a better pre- 
sentation of the bett that Herbart has thought, and at the S'-^n^V^'^f, tn Inv 
adaptation of that thought to American needs of the present day than any 
other book I know of." —Professor Herman T. Lukens, 

Southwestern State Normal School, California, Pa. 

«' Such a translation, adapted by discriminating annotation to lead Ameri- 
can teachers to see the application of these principles to American schools 
is very desirable. The bibliographical references scattered throughout, and 
the skilful annotation add very greatly to the value of the work. 

— Professor J. W. Jenks, 

Cornell University, Ithaca, N. Y. 

" It is one more strong book for teachers." 

— President Francis W. Parker, 

Chicago Institute, 111. 

"The translation is faithful, lucid, and thoroughly English, and the 
thoughtful annotations by Dr. De Garmo, bringing Herbart s doctrine 
thoroughly up to our time, will secure for this work permanent value to 
American teachers." _ ^^ ^ Hailman, 

Superintendent, Dayton, Ohio. 

" It is a valuable contribution to Herbartian Pedagogy. ^ Especially is 
this the case since the editors have ' modernized Herbart s views and 
pointed out places where his theory does not apply to modern social condi- 
tions." _ Professor C. E. Rugh, ^ ^ , ^, . ^ 

State Normal School, Clarion, Pa. 



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